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SOCIETY 



THE REDEEMED FORM OF MAN, 



AND 



THE EARNEST OF GOD'S OMNIPOTENCE 
IN HUMAN NATURE: 

AFFIRMED IN 

LETTERS TO A FRIEND 



By HENRY JAMES. 



"Man during his earthly life induces a form in the purest substances of his 
interiors, so that he may be said to form his own soul, or give it quality; and 
according to the form or quality of soul he thus gives himself will be his subsequent 
receptivity to the Lord's inflowing life : which is a life of love to the whole human 
race." 



1879 ^./ 7 



BOSTON: 
HOUGHTON, OSGOOD AND COMPANY. 

(£&e Etoerstoe Press, CamfaflJs*. 
1879. 



ft.*"* 



Copyright, 1879. 
By HENRY JAMES. 



n 



- 3 7/o 



ELECTROTYPED AND PRINTED AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS, 
CAMBRIDGE. 



CONTENTS. 



LETTER I. 

PAGE 

Antagonism between the ideas of human freedom and human destiny 3 

" Destiny " fatal to nature as well 16 

LETTER II. 

History a struggle between man's race force and his personal force 17 

The struggle is inherent in man's creatureship 20 

His spiritual creation exacts his previous natural formation 22 

To what creative excellency is this exaction owing ? 24 

LETTER III. 

The meaning of Infinite Love 26 

It means, freedom from self-love, and hence stamps self-love unreal 28 

Inferiority of science to philosophy as an intellectual culture 30 

Man unreal in se, and made real only by natural redemption 32 

Primacy of the heart in belief 34 

LETTER IV. 

Divine truth has first to create the intelligence it afterwards en- 
lightens , . . . , , 35 

Its force purely regenerative 38 

Persistent Judaism of the Church 39 

" Professional " religion the true Antichrist 40 

Ritualism, revivalism, radicalism 42 



IV CONTENTS. 



LETTEE V. 

Sudden demoralization of the writer 43 

Almost complete moral imbecility 46 

Charm of English landscape 47 

Growing delight in nature, and disgust with oneself 48 

A friend's account of Swedenborg , 50 

I am much interested 51 

I resolve to read him 52 

LETTEE VI. 

A few explanatory words about Swedenborg 53 

LETTEE VII. 

Further observations about Swedenborg 64 

LETTEE VIII. 

My moral death and burial.. 70 

Profound moral illusion under which I had been living 72 

My relief from it equivalent to my belief in the incarnation 74 

The moral law essentially typical and prophetic 76 

Its votaries make it utterly flat, vapid, and spiritless 78 

The law a present stench in the earth 80 

LETTEE IX. 

Difference between the real Jew and the Christian imitation 81 

"We live not under a literal but a spiritual Divine administration ... 84 

Growing indifference of m en to their civic repute 86 

Our current ecclesiastical culture frivolous and unmanly 88 

The horse-car our true Shechinah at this day 90 

Christ's precise work on earth 92 

LETTEE X. 

Swedenborg's interpretation of the gospel 93 

The origin of spiritual evil 96 



CONTENTS. 



Creation inevitably contracts soil on its subjective side 98 

Creation as a spiritual work of God is plainly miraculous, and 

therefore admits no witness but that of life or consciousness 100 

LETTER XI. 

Objection to miracle 104 

Miracle is bad science, but very good philosophy 106 

My own intellectual attitude towards miracle 112 

Infirmity of the critical or sceptical understanding 118 

Swedenborg an out-and-out realist 124 

LETTEK XII. 

Creation a spontaneous work 125 

Nature unreal and impersonal 127 

It is a functioning of Divine Love towards our spiritual manhood 130 

The educative use of our natural experience 132 

Genesis of this absurd cosmological " Nothing " 134 

Creation as a letter an immense fallacy 136 

Creation has no locus in quo but the human consciousness 138 

Its sole and total method: Redemption 140 

LETTER XIII. 

God the sole subject in creation, man the sole object 141 

Creation only a philosophic name for our natural redemption ...... 144 

What do we mean by the term Nature ? 146 

Nature a strictly subjective, or metaphysical existence 148 

Concrete uses of the word 150 

Nature realizable to thought, but not to sense 152 

Human nature is the sphere of man's subjective relations 154 

It has no existence but as the attribute of a subject 156 

Humanity not a material fact, but a spiritual truth 158 

Human nature the living link between God and man 160 

Our selfhood inexplicable without the creator's natural incar- 
nation 162 



VI CONTENTS. 



LETTEE XIV. 

Personality the true ground of unbelief 164 

Natural incarnation the only method of spiritual creation 166 

History nothing else than a theatre of Divine revelation 174 

Spiritual value of miracle as a scientific irritant 178 

LETTEE XV. 

Human nature vs. the human person 180 

The church, the main citadel of existing evil and falsity 182 

Claim of a personal interest in Christ preposterous 184 

Swedenborg's doctrine of the constitution of the church 186 

Statements in regard to the prehistoric church 188 

Innocence of a natural inclination to selfhood 190 

Unhandsome pre-natal developments of the church 192 

Creation essentially miraculous 194 

LETTEE XVI. 

Our selfish and worldly loves made evil by the influence of 

proprium 195 

The excess of them even not hateful to God, because he utilizes 

it in the hells 198 

The only intolerable evil to God is proprium, selfhood, or self- 

• righteousness 200 

For this is spiritual or living evil ; and fatal, if allowed, to the 

human race 201 

The church alone produces this desperate evil in men 204 

Conscience the evidence of an infinite and a finite struggle in our 

nature 206 

The church a mere rudimentary exponent of conscience 208 

Change of plan 210 

LETTEE XVII. 

Laws of the spiritual creation 211 

Spiritual creation inert without the creature's natural constitution 214 



CONTENTS. vii 



Implication of nature in creation gives it all its interest to the heart 218 

Spiritual creation interpreted by the doctrine of evolution 220 

Difference between the philosophic and the scientific idea of it 222 

Evolution relatively a spiritual flower ; involution its natural stem 224 

Science essentially ministerial, not magisterial to the mind 226 

Nature neither begins nor ends anything 228 

LETTEK XVIII. 

The forte and foible of science 229 

Nature's first lesson to the intellect 231 

Difference between physical and natural existence 232 

The philosopher has no call to look at nature outwardly 234 

Science has no perception of the spiritual ends of nature, and 

therefore confounds nature with physics 236 

It claims that natural existence is identical with spiritual being . . . 240 

Professor Huxley as a philosopher 242 

What protoplasm symbolizes to the intellect 244 

Physicism a providential gospel 246 

LETTEE XIX. 

Swedenborg's philosophy of nature 247 

Good and evil the mere earth of the finite consciousness 250 

Heaven and hell have only a subjective truth 252 

Subjective genesis of hell in man 254 

Hell is always heaven to the evil man but when he is forced not 

to do evil 256 

Human nature the sole sphere of creative power 258 

LETTEE XX. 

Creation a fusion of God and man 260 

It includes creator and creature quite equally 262 

Deism as a philosophy is a gross absurdity 264 

Creation consists spiritually in divinizing the created nature ; and 

so redeeming it from the power and taint of evil 266 



Vlll CONTENTS. 



The evil of human nature is subjective consciousness 270 

Man's moral evils are not the true evil of his nature 272 

That consists in exteriorating the creator to the creature 274 

LETTEE XXI. 

Illusory genesis of selfhood 276 

Effect of the illusion in necessitating a Divine-natural order of life 278 

This order alone releases man from the evils incident to his selfhood 280 

Superiority of living knowledge to mere science for creative ends 282 

Science or learning natters the illusion of selfhood 284 

The object in knowledge glorifies the subject out of self-conscious- 
ness 286 

The rule of our natural knowledge the rule of our natural life 288 

Our nature — what? and how constituted ? 290 

The church's testimony to the Christian facts 292 

The realm of fact inferior to the realm of truth 294 

Unhappy results to the intellect in tethering it to sense 296 

Attitude of men of science 298 

Difference between science and faith 299 

The gospel untrue tidings to every one who does not first find it 

good 300 

Man's allegiance henceforth due to Divine-natural good alone 302 

LETTEE XXII. 

The state culminates in the republic 304 

The republic ends our political life 306 

The angels an imperfect work of God 307 

Swedenborg's indictment of the angelic personality 308 

He shows it severely ministerial to a work of God in human nature 310 

Man's private selfhood the only inveterate enemy of God 312 

Is our natural alienation from God, a fact of science ? 314 

Or is it a truth of our personal consciousness merely ? 316 

Our inherited theology sottish and suffocating 318 

The Divine-natural humanity alone worthy of men's acknowledg- 
ment 320 



CONTENTS. ix 



Selfhood the natural birthmark or congenital stigma of the creature 322 

An implication, not an explication of the spiritual creation 324 

A dense mask behind which God effects our natural redemption... 326 

A mere generalized form of man's natural contrariety to God 328 

Impossible to believe any longer in God's s^niatural attributes... 330 
God a practical power adequate to all man's natural (or impersonal) 

needs ■ 332 

He never poses for men's admiration 334 

LETTER XXIII. 

A higher and lower order of knowledge in man 335 

Science self-disqualified as a research of being 338 

The spiritual being of things distinct from their natural existence. . . 340 

"We achieve the love of our kind only by practically unloving self. . . 342 

Spiritual creation unreal unless based in the created nature 344 

Implication of the creature's nature in creation, alone makes it real 346 

Swedenborg describes creation as a house of three stories 348 

Miracle a sensuous symbol of the creative infinitude 350 

LETTER XXIV. 

Science terrene, sense subterrene 352 

Essential or spiritual, and existential or natural, Divine manhood 354 

The subjective element in experience intrinsically evil and perishable 356 

Science a perpetual strainer for the imbecile judgments of sense ... 358 

Not sense, but selfhood, the chief obstacle to man's spiritual welfare 360 
Nirvana, or self-extinction, impossible to created or self-conscious 

existence 362 

The gospel facts worthless save as a revelation of God's infinitude 364 
The scientific or ontologic hypothesis of being fundamentally stupid 

and void 366 

How man realizes immortality 368 

A personal reminiscence 369 

Anecdote of a murderer's mundane post-mortem perturbations 370 

No degree of post-mortem experience equivalent to immortal life... 372 



X CONTENTS. 

Immortality depends upon no personal favour of God to us 374 

Christ's unique lustre, that he despised man's moral righteousness 376 
No man a creature of God in his own right, or independently of 

others ■..-..- 378 

God's new church a thoroughly new natural spirit or life in man... 380 

LETTEE XXV. 

Church development of our nature — 382 

Christianity spiritually fulfilled in the events of our own history ... 384 

Christ's spiritual foes are they who greatly exalt his finite person 386 
Error in point of philosophy of the moralist or statesman : that he 

thinks civilization based upon the absoluteness of morality ... 388 

The church primarily and inveterately hostile to moralism 392 

The latest church development proves its utter spiritual decease... 394 

Our highest morality claims no higher sanction than prudence 396 

Moral offences not contrary to nature but to culture 398 

Meaning of our civic constitution 400 

It is a mere steward of man's spiritual destiny 402 

It utterly misapprehends its providential function 404 

The spiritual form of our nature or creation is social 406 

But we are born desperately unsocial or selfish 408 

The personal illusion sole root of hell in us 410 

LETTEE XXVI. 

Moralist and churchman defined 412 

The root-error in both the same, but more curable in the former... 414 
It is more superficial in the one, and more substantial in the 

other 416 

All manner of sin forgiven to men but that against the Holy 

Ghost 418 

Self-righteousness the outgrowth of a church-soil in our nature . . . 420 
Both "the church" and "the world" a mere germination of hu- 
man nature 422 

" Church " and " world " a distinctively natural development in man 424 

"Church" and "world" natural facts 426 



CONTENTS. XI 



LETTEE XXVII. 

We do not inherit human nature, but attain to it by regeneration 427 

Our natural history is a divinely redemptive process 430 

Human nature is a universal realm of consciousness in man 432 

Human nature not the spiritual creation, but reveals it 434 

She fills out our unreal persons with valid human substance 436 

She is the life of law or order in all lower existences 438 

She is inwardly instinct with love and therefore loathes asceticism 440 

But only as a moral force she shows her true infiniting tenderness 442 

LETTEE XXYIII. 

Human nature metaphysical 444 

God alone is man either in substance or in form 446 

The creative power in men contingent upon their nature taking 

form 448 

Nature the sphere of redemption in man 450 

The inward meaning of creation is man's deliverance from evil ... 452 
Man's freedom and rationality do not make him man : they merely 

qualify him to become man 454 

God is entirely without a power of independent action 45 8 

Our moral and rational manhood not a real but a typical manhood 460 

Christ crucified the only adequate revelation of God in humanity. . . 462 

The church and the world purely subjective realities in man 464 

They are the simple machinery of our natural evolution 466 

The existing world-wide tragedy of human life is that church and 

world persist in burrowing in men's private conscience 468 

States no sooner become united than society is inaugurated 472 

The only obstacle to God's kingdom is the hypocrisy of the church 474 

The late collapsed Mr. Moody or present distended Mr. Cook 476 

The author takes an affectionate leave of his correspondent, by a 

citation from Swedenborg 478 

Appendix A 481 

Appendix B. 

Proprium or selfhood, the source of all evil 484 



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LETTER I 




Y DEAR ERIEND: — You know that I 
am not in good health. Ever since my 
illness of last May, now more than a 
year ago, my nerves are easily unstrung 
by protracted labor, and I am consequently not 
very sure beforehand that I can meet the demands 
of your recent letter as well as I should like to. 
Still I am persuaded that even for weary nerves 
there is no sedative so sovereign as the reconciling 
truths we are going to consider, and I hope there- 
fore that our conference will not, on the whole, 
prove tedious or enervating to either of us. 

I will quote a few lines of your letter in order 
that by my comment upon them I may pitch the tune 
of our subsequent discussion, or indicate the har- 
monic issues to which I would have it lead. You 
say : " I cannot bear to think with any purpose of 
my private regeneration after having so long com- 
mitted all my Godward hopes to the destiny of my 



4 ANTAGONISM BETWEEN THE IDEAS OF 

race. Least of all should I be likely to entertain 
that question just now, when the labors of Messrs. 
Moody and Sankey, and the rhetoric of Rev. Joseph 
Cook, seem providentially intended to show us the 
vulgar egotism and the blatant unbelief in the 
Divine name, with which it is almost sure to be 
associated." 

Now I have as little respect for Messrs. Moody 
and Sankey, and for their flashy, histrionic colleague, 
as you can desire, and think our daily papers might 
easily furnish better food to their readers than the 
puerile stuff they give us as reports of these men's 
sensational sermons and lectures. But what interests 
me chiefly in the extract from your letter is the 
general sentiment of preference you exhibit for a 
fixed life of relation to God over one of a free 
and spiritual character : that is, for a life of passive 
submission to your race-destiny, over one of active 
private regeneration. You have always one great 
merit, that of knowing well your own mind. Bat 
I take the liberty of offering you a few considera- 
tions in regard to this sentiment of preference you 
express, which perhaps you have not done justice 
to, and which may therefore lead you in the pres- 
ent case to an improved knowledge of your own 
mind. 

Let me ask you then, in the first place, what good 



HUMAN FREEDOM AND HUMAN DESTINY. 5 

our race-destiny is going to do us individually ? Our 
race-destiny is thoroughly incapable, I am happy to 
say, of furnishing a destiny for the individual man. 
We are not the race, but individuals embraced in it ; 
and though there is beyond doubt a race-destiny for 
man, there is no such thing as an individual destiny. 
Human individuality is constituted by freedom and 
rationality; and if therefore a certain destiny were 
imposed upon it to fulfil, either by deity or demon, 
it would immediately collapse. If I am really des- 
tined to undergo a certain mental development, end- 
ing in my spiritual manhood, just as I am destined 
to undergo a certain physical growth ending in my 
natural manhood, it must be because I have no self- 
hood — that is, no freedom and rationality — where- 
with to work out my spiritual manhood. In short, 
to have a fixed "destiny" is not to be a free and 
rational subject, and therefore to be without indi- 
viduality; and to be without individuality is to be 
destitute of spiritual possibilities, and claim only nat- 
ural. 

I repeat, then, that the human race alone, and not 
any individual subject of it, claims a Divine "des- 
tiny," because the race has only an indefinite or uni- 
versal personality, and of itself therefore is only fit 
to minister to a defined or individual one. But the 
individual man, because he is by creation free and 



6 ANTAGONISM BETWEEN THE IDEAS OF 

rational, is ipso facto the arbiter of his own spirit- 
ual life and character : that is, he either remains 
what he already is by derivation from his past an- 
cestry, and the circumstances of his own position, 
or else he becomes a new and regenerate form of 
life, according to his own pleasure. 

Thus your and my private regeneration is not an 
outcome of destiny in any sense of the word. No 
doubt, we may picture the heart of God as very 
much interested in every man's private or spiritual 
regeneration. But then at the same time we must 
take extreme good care not to represent Him as in- 
terested in it to the extent of "destining" any of 
us for it, as the sect of Universalists holds ; or what 
is the same thing, imposing it upon any of us contrary 
to his own good will and pleasure ; because obviously 
that would be to represent Him as violating the 
express means He has appointed for bringing it 
about, and so defeating the realization of it. For 
what does our spiritual regeneration mean? It 
means — our new birth, or our getting a new heart 
and mind: that is, a different one from that we 
are actually born to, or inherit from our forefathers. 
As this old heart and mind take place in us with- 
out our own privity or consent previously asked, so 
our new birth signalizes its own superior lustre or 
more intimate nearness to us, by conditioning itself 



HUMAN FREEDOM AND HUMAN DESTINY. 7 

upon our private freedom and rationality, or accom- 
modating itself to our secret hearts' demands, de- 
rived from culture. 

This is what to every man, spiritually exercised, 
makes his private regeneration a question of such 
vital moment, namely : that Ids deepest instincts of 
manJiood are met by it, and by it alone. For ex- 
ample, my inherited personality is full of stain or 
frailty derived from some or other of my progeni- 
tors, so that I find myself, when tempted, not only 
liable but sure to succumb to theft, false witness, 
adultery, or murder. Now in this state of things 
it is evident that unless there be some Divine reve- 
lation in our nature and history making me aware 
of this tendency to evil in me, and prompting me 
to combat it, I am as good as gone to all eternity. 
Tor I have no intuitive conscience of the difference 
between good and evil, but only an empirical or 
acquired one. As far as my personal intuitions go 
I unhesitatingly deem good evil and evil good. Our 
moral conscience is a Divine endowment of our na- 
ture exclusively, utterly beyond the sphere of our 
personal intuitions ; and we come into the experience 
of it accordingly only through the intercourse of our 
kind. It is notorious to every man of thoroughly 
educated experience, that when he is tempted to bear 
false witness, to steal, to commit adultery, or murder, 



8 ANTAGONISM BETWEEN THE IDEAS OF 

the whole pressure of the temptation lies in the fact 
that these damnable things seem ravishingly good 
to him and not evil. Other men, interested in pre- 
venting me doing them may denounce them as evil. 
But I in my secret heart, when tempted by these 
unhandsome things, cannot help pronouncing them 
good, the most intimate and exquisite good I know, 
in fact ; and I inwardly renounce the doing of them 
only out of deference to the Divine law forbid- 
ding me to do them under penalty of death. 

I repeat then, that it is this strictly redemptive 
effort of God in our nature, which alone qualifies 
me to realize my deepest human instincts, or learn 
in what consists my true freedom and rationality. 
Before being inwardly born — before being spirit- 
ually quickened — I have no misgiving as to my 
appetites and passions forming in me only a condi- 
tional or limited good. They seem so much my 
nearest good, that I feel no higher exercise of free- 
dom or selfhood possible to me, than to obey them 
unreservedly, or whenever they demand satisfaction. 
And I have no sort of a suspicion, until I receive 
my information from others, that I am then mean- 
while, in spite of my apparent selfhood or freedom, 
the wretched slave of wy personal organization. It 
seems at this period so like free action to give way 
to my appetites and passions regardless of any 



HUMAN FREEDOM AND HUMAN DESTINY. 9 

higher law, and my nascent unripe sense of self- 
hood or personality is so fostered by it, that I can- 
not help yielding for a while to the deceptive seem- 
ing : but it is wholly a seeming, destitute of the 
least vital truth. Sooner or later this felt freedom 
— this apparent rationality of mine — confess them- 
selves a burdensome and abject servitude, from which 
there is no release but in the fetterless air of the spir- 
itual world. In fact, dear friend, our inherited self- 
hood or freedom — the selfhood that comes to us 
from birth, or is derived to us from our special an- 
cestry — is a mere provisional base for a Divinely- 
given selfhood or personality, which comes to us 
through the natural redemption wrought in us by 
the Lord Jesus Christ: and it is literally next to 
nothing, if it refuse to operate as such base. 

Admitting then that we have to the fullest extent 
a "destined" or unfree life of God in our race: I 
ask afresh how does that supply the wants of our 
free spiritual or highest culture? And can a man 
really be so false to the instincts of his proper man- 
hood as deliberately to prefer a "destined" life, 
even at the Divine hands, to one of freedom? I 
know my good friend Emerson has long been sing- 
ing us songs set to this indolent tune, and that 
many feebler warblers reflect his inspiration. And 
I know besides, that our orthodox churches give 



10 ANTAGONISM BETWEEN THE IDEAS OF 

out so clecrepid a doctrine of the Divine name, and 
our Unitarian or rationalistic pulpits in their turn 
reply to it in so scant and penurious a strain, 
that the common mind has grown altogether tired 
of the senseless jangle, and prefers to take its very 
unexacting religion and philosophy at the hands of a 
poet, and that too a pantheistic one. But you don't 
belong to the common or scientific crowd of men, 
shut up like so many gregarious sheep to the pens 
of sense. You are a person first of all of sincere, 
original thought, taking nothing on trust from other 
men, despising the servile limits of sensuous obser- 
vation by which their intellect is bound, and think- 
ing out your own conclusions according to the free 
range of sympathy and intelligence God has given 
you. And you accordingly can never permanently 
consent to sell your Divine birthright of freedom, 
for the paltry mess of pottage these respectable senti- 
mentalists offer you under the name of " destiny." 
Besides, so active an intellect as yours ought by this 
time to know that we can have no positive but only 
a negative action upon this destined life of our race, 
because our race interests belong exclusively to God, 
and He is absolute over them. We have no power 
to promote our race destiny, but by our spiritual 
regeneration. Every man who becomes regenerate by 
abstaining from the commission of evils, in virtue 



HUMAN FREEDOM AND HUMAN DESTINY. 11 

purely of their contrariety to the Divine name, does 
indirectly promote his race-evolution y because he ceases 
any longer actively to obstruct and retard it. Our 
natural evolution, or our race-destiny, is to put on 
Divine form and order; and this form and order 
undeniably consist in each man seeking supremely 
the good of the whole, and in all men seeking 
supremely the good of each. It is manifest then that 
the regenerate person does indirectly promote this 
race-evolution, inasmuch as he alone freely abstains 
from conflict with his fellowman. But this is all 
he does towards it, and a fortiori all and more than 
all that any one else does towards it. The man who 
lives in practically selfish relations with his kind, 
seeking himself first and his neighbor last, does ab- 
solutely nothing for his race or nature but retard 
its due and orderly evolution. And when it is 
evolved, he will do nothing spiritually to promote 
its well-being, because although he will then be in- 
hibited from any moral conflict with his fellows, he 
will cultivate no spiritual sympathy with them. 

What then? Do I urge you to cherish an intel- 
lectual indifference to your race-destiny? God for- 
bid ! I should in so doing be utterly faithless to 
my own best inspiration. I find it unspeakably 
blessed to believe that there is a Diviiie-natwal 
destiny for man slowly but surely working out, which 



12 ANTAGONISM BETWEEN THE IDEAS OF 

no spiritual wickedness in high places, nor any per- 
sonal stupidity and egotism on our part, can seri- 
ously compromise. Why? Because this benign 
conviction gives me the indispensable stay or guar- 
antee which my meagre individual faith and hope in 
God demand as a basis. I could of course have no 
spiritual or private hope for myself in God, unless 
it were built upon His natural or public mercy to 
my race: for how shall any man this side of 
hell ever deem himself a fitter object of the 
Divine complacency than any other man, especially 
than all men? My moral freedom — my freedom 
to be good or evil at my pleasure, subject only to 
what is due to other men — is full of the divinest 
benignity to my nature, because the development of 
that nature in all Divine form and order is condi- 
tioned upon it. The actual distinction of heaven and 
hell, in fact, is conditioned upon it; which distinc- 
tion is no less vital to spiritual order. So that the 
interests of both worlds, natural and spiritual alike, 
may be said to demand it. But my moral freedom 
is but a quasi freedom after all, and therefore how- 
ever it may condition my true or spiritual freedom, 
is heaven-wide of constituting it. My moral free- 
dom consists in my ability, under the pressure of 
any mercenary motive, to abstain from false-witness, 
theft, adultery, and murder. My spiritual freedom 



HUMAN FREEDOM AND HUMAN DESTINY. 13 

endows me with a totally new motive of action, 
which is the love of God and my neighbor, or the 
power of immortal life ; and so not only enables me 
to abstain with disgust from these unholy things, but 
to do with relish the exact opposite. The element 
of will or choice is everything in the moral life, and 
the fussy votaries of it accordingly are absurdly tena- 
cious of their personal merit. But this element of 
will or choice scarcely enters appreciably into the 
spiritual life, unless into the lowest forms of it ; and 
in all the higher or celestial forms it is unknown. 
I rejoice then with unspeakable joy in this order- 
ing of our natural destiny at God's hands — this 
final and decisive adjustment of men's outward and 
warring relations — because in the first place it 
authenticates every deepest breath of man's regene- 
rate hope and aspiration towards God, and in the 
second place forever exempts men from the tempta- 
tion again to seek their own welfare by the methods 
of vice and crime. But apart from these considera- 
tions — apart, in other words, from its power to illus- 
trate the Divine name — I have no thought nor care 
about our natural destiny. Especially when invited 
to regard it, as so many men at this day do, in the 
light of a full satisfaction to men's faith and hope 
in God, it seems to me inexpressibly revolting. For 
after all is said that can be said, it is a mere reduc- 



14 ANTAGONISM BETWEEN THE IDEAS OF 

tion to order of man's natural or constitutional life, 
with the spiritual, functional, or infinite side of his 
being left out. And are men content to deem them- 
selves cattle, that they expect no higher boon at the 
hands of the Divine Natural Humanity but an 
unexampled provision for their board and lodging? 
Understand me then, and understand my books. 
I strongly affirm a Divine destiny — a Divine-nat- 
ural order — for mankind, but I affirm it in the in- 
terest of the Divine name alone, which the church 
obscures, by practically cutting off men's secular 
hope towards God, unless it claims a sanctimonious 
basis. In short I have no interest in maintaining 
this truth of a Divinely appointed destiny for the 
race, but the interest of Divine justice or righteous- 
ness. Of course no one can deny that it is infi- 
nitely pleasanter to think of men living together in 
outward harmony, than living like pigs in a sty, 
where every one is bent upon grabbing as much 
as he can from his neighbor, or pushing away his 
unfortunate neighbor from the trough altogether. 
But the outward order of human life is, after all, 
supremely pleasant to me, because it discloses an 
eternal Divine rest and refreshment for the inward 
man, or indicates at least the method by which the 
individual conscience attains to spiritual peace in 
God. If our natural evolution did nothing to reveal 



HUMAN FREEDOM AND HUMAN DESTINY. 15 



and guarantee our inward and immortal joy in God, 
I for one should be obdurately indifferent to it. If 
my life is to be spiritually snuffed out at last, I 
should very much prefer to have beforehand no nat- 
ural glimpse of peace and order, arising from the 
Divine subjugation of heaven and hell, to mislead 
me into making false inferences. 

I have now said nearly enough to make my mean- 
ing on this subject clearly intelligible to you. I am 
not, you perceive, the least indisposed to believe that 
I am " destined " by the Divine providence — either 
in my own person or the persons of my descend- 
ants — to the possible enjoyment of health, wealth, 
and all manner of outward prosperity, in the evolu- 
tion of a final natural order for man on the earth, 
or the development of a united race-personality. But 
I am utterly averse to believing that "destiny" has 
any the least hand in, or poiver over, my iniuard rela- 
tions to infinite goodness and truth, or my instinct of 
spiritual freedom. Every such sentiment indeed I 
trample under foot with a resolute and hearty good 
will, for it aims to obscure the very central glory and 
most dazzling effulgence of the creative name. Let 
me here say besides, very briefly, though the theme 
well deserves a Letter to itself, that if I could feel 
that I had been " destined" to love goodness and 
truth in spite of the preternatural sweetness to my 



16 "DESTINY" FATAL TO NATURE AS WELL. 

heart of evil and falsity, the sentiment of an inmost 
freedom and rationality which now qualifies my 
manhood, would instantly wither at its source, 
and even my nature disown its proper life or 
selfhood. For my nature derives its total power 
to function from the spiritual world, and if you ex- 
haust that world — the world of man's substantial 
freedom or individuality — of its hold upon my affec- 
tion and faith, you a fortiori reduce my natural life 
to inanition, and relegate me, its conscious subject, to 
instant unconsciousness. 



LETTER II 




UT our difference, according to your own 
showing, is far more vital, intellectually, 
than any we have yet apprehended, be- 
longing rather to the realm of thought 
than that of sentiment. You say, for example: "I 
am told on every hand that you believe in Jesus 
Christ as the only God. If this be true I cannot 
help expressing my disappointment." And then, 
after saying that you have not so understood my 
books, you continue in words following: "You 
mean by Christ more than any one human person- 
ality. You don't identify God with any person 
whatever, but with all human nature. I never 
should suspect you of the narrowness here imputed 
to you. But how can I feel sure that I am right 
about your belief, when all your readers with whom 
I am acquainted feel sure that I am wrong ? " 

My books are too small a thing to excite contro- 
versy, but at least let me express my mortification 



18 HISTORY A STRUGGLE BETWEEN MAN'S 



that to a reader of your perspicacity they should 
have borne an uncertain sound on the point in ques- 
tion. This conies in part perhaps of your overlook- 
ing the sharp discrimination I habitually make 
between nature and person, or between what is real 
and what is merely phenomenal in human existence \ 
but I must confess that on the whole your criticism 
is damaging to my self-love. Let me then try again 
to expose to you the philosophic ground of my con- 
victions on this subject, and to this end indulge me 
with a brief backward glance at the history of the 
human mind, by way of getting a starting-point com- 
prehensive enough to show in the sequel where the 
philosophic truth comes in. 

Since time began two races have struggled for pre- 
cedence in the womb of humanity, one of which we 
may call the child of bondage, the other the child 
of freedom ; one embodying the interests of man's 
outward or conscious life, the other those of his in- 
ward or unconscious life ; one representing his nat- 
ural or race-force, the other his spiritual or personal 
force. In history this antagonism in human thought 
and life has been variously symbolized : now as the 
actual or old Jerusalem in contrast with a new Jeru- 
salem which is yet to come j now as a legal Divine 
economy in opposition to a gracious one; now as a 
visible or figurative order of human life in opposi- 



EACE FORCE AND HIS PERSONAL FORCE. 19 

tion to an invisible or real order; finally and in 
brief, as the world and the church. 

"The world" and "the church/' then, have been 
symbols of thought to man, growing out of the fun- 
damental needs of his intellect : what precise intel- 
lectual needs do these opposing symbols attest or 
stand for? 

"The world" represents the interests of human 
universality — say human nature in short ; " the 
church" represents the interests of human individu- 
ality — say human regeneration, in short. Thus we 
may say that the world stands for the fatal side of 
human life, those interests of man which relate him 
willy-nilly to his fellowman, and therefore place 
him more or less in the voluntary category, or under 
the rule of duty, of force, of necessity, of destiny. 
And the church on the other hand symbolizes the 
free side of human life, those interests of man which 
relate him primarily to his infinite source, and which 
exalt him therefore into the category of spontaneity, 
or express — all duty done and all destiny achieved 
— the reign thenceforth of taste, of culture, of in- 
ward attraction or delight, of immortal life in short- 
Human regeneration is doubtless the sole spiritual 
end of God's creative providence ; as the human race 
is its sole incidental natural end. And as the highest 
Divine blessing for the regenerate man is freedom, 



20 THE STRUGGLE IS INHERENT 

so the highest Divine blessing for the race is, inci- 
dentally, an order competent to secure such freedom. 
But I repeat that we cannot be too particular in 
denying "the world" and "the church" any final 
validity, and restricting them to a purely symbolic 
virtue. In their material or technical aspect they 
are plainly irrelevant to the grand ideas they sym- 
bolize : what calls itself " the church," for example, 
being notoriously so devoted to the pretence of order, 
as to carry it to the pitch of ritualism or supersti- 
tion; and what calls itself "the world" so devoted 
to the pretence of freedom as to run it into radical- 
ism, so contemning the order which alone saves free- 
dom from license. Nevertheless in their symbolic 
character they have been of incalculable succulence 
to the intellect, as without the vital contrast and 
oppugnancy which they have always represented to 
human thought, human progress would have proved 
abortive, or perished in its cradle. 

And now having secured our needful starting- 
point in the brief historic generalization here given, 
it only remains to inquire further in this connection 
why this sharp discrimination between nature and 
spirit, or between the universal and individual in- 
terest in human life, should have been so vital to 
the mind, as to make all history resound with it? 

To tell the great truth in one very brief word: 



IN MAN'S CREATURESHIP. 21 

it is because man is the creature of God, and is essen- 
tially therefore a divided personality ; one aspect of it 
relating him to his own nature or his fellow-man, 
so giving him conscious or finite and phenomenal 
existence ; the other aspect of it relating him to God 
or his spiritual source, so giving him real or uncon- 
scious and infinite being. Understand me. If man 
be in truth a creature of God, then two things be- 
come at once necessary: 1. That he possess real or 
unconscious being only in God ; and 2. That he 
possess conscious or phenomenal existence exclusively 
in himself. Because if his real or unconscious being 
were not in God but in himself, then he himself 
would instantly cease to exist or appear ; and if his 
conscious or phenomenal existence were not in him- 
self but in God, then he would himself instantly cease 
to be. In the one case he would forfeit natural ex- 
istence; in the other he would forfeit spiritual 
being. 

This fact, then, of man's creatureship — that is, the 
bare fact that his real being lies in the Divine perfec- 
tion, and that he only claims in himself phenomenal 
or unreal existence — requires that his history pre- 
sent that duality of movement which exhibits him 
now as a spiritual or individual force, now as a natu- 
ral or universal one. Accordingly it is sheerly im- 
possible to deal with man intelligently or intelligibly 



22 HIS SPIKITUAL CREATION EXACTS 



upon any other logical basis than this of his crea- 
tureship : that is to say, upon the basis of his refer- 
ring his true or spiritual being infinitely away from 
himself, namely : to God ; and claiming to himself 
instead a mere natural, phenomenal, or shadowy ex- 
istence. At all events this is the view which I find 
myself forced to take of man's being and history, 
that is, of his spiritual origin and his natural des- 
tiny; and it is especially the view which I shall 
try to enforce throughout the present letters. 

Very well then : so far at least there is no room 
for misunderstanding. No one can deny that his- 
tory demonstrates a divided empire in man. Every 
man of experience or observation knows that man 
is subject to a double law, one outward, natural, con- 
stitutional, so to speak, relating him whether he will 
or not to his fellow-man; the other inward, spirit- 
ual, creative, so to speak, relating him freely to God. 
The first of these laws has respect to man as a whole, 
or in a universal aspect, obeying the empire of neces- 
sity. The second has respect to him only in his in- 
dividual capacity, obeying the inspiration of freedom. 
I repeat then : so far there is no ground for misun- 
derstanding between us. 

But now I am going to say something which per- 
haps neither experience nor observation has made 
plain to you, and which may therefore give rise to 



HIS PREVIOUS NATURAL FORMATION. 23 

misunderstanding, if I do not very fully explain my- 
self. You know that I have traced the fact of man's 
divided existence to the truth of his creatureship, 
which requires on the one hand that he possess spir- 
itual or invisible being in his Creator, and on the 
other natural or visible existence in himself. Because 
if man possessed only spiritual being in his Creator, 
he would be without any ground of consciousness in 
himself, and hence without any recognition of the dif- 
ference between him and God. And if he possessed 
only natural or visible existence in himself, he would 
manifestly be uncreated. At all events he would 
then have no pretension, as now, to deem himself 
the creature of an infinite power. I do not hesitate 
to say therefore that his peculiar creatureship implies 
this double bond of spiritual or infinite being, and of 
natural or finite existence. 

But if such be the implication of man's creature- 
ship, the phenomenon must of course attribute itself 
to something in the creative perfection. There is ob- 
viously nothing in the creature which has not its sole 
raison d'etre in the greatness of the Creator ; and if 
we would ascertain accordingly why it is that man 
has always worn a divided aspect — here exalting 
himself above the neighbor, there subjecting himself 
to the neighbor — we must seek our answer only in 
the excellence of the creative name. Let us ask 



24 TO WHAT CEEATIVE EXCELLENCY 

therefore, to what essential excellence of the crea- 
tive name it is owing, that man, its creature, should 
inevitably wear to himself a finite and phenomenal 
aspect, or feel a conscience of limitary relations with 
God and his fellow-man? 

It is owing very obviously to nothing else than 
the infinitude of the creative Love : which requires 
that the Creator in creating or imparting life to His 
creatures should first of all endow them with self- 
hood, or subjective consciousness, in order that such 
consciousness in giving them quasi or phenomenal 
projection from Himself, may ever after serve them 
as an infallible negative basis or mirror of all posi- 
tive Divine knowledge. And selfhood, or subjec- 
tive consciousness,' being contingent as it is upon 
the perception of a controlling object, in relation to 
which alone it is either good or evil, we have the 
entire moral history of the race provided in this 
antagonism of inward and outward, subject and ob- 
ject, man and nature, which is incidental to the very 
idea of creation. 

But here you will ask me to be more explicit. 
You will ask me to explain to you in a less cursory 
manner than I have done in the last paragraph, why 
the infinitude of the Creator requires Him, as I 
have said, to endow His creature with selfhood, or 
subjective life? To answer this we must take a 



IS THIS EXACTION OWING? 25 

new Letter. Permit me, however, meanwhile to say, 
that after the frank exposition already given you 
can have no longer any excuse for doubting that 
I at least, whatever others may do, not only value 
human freedom in its higher aspect, as the culminat- 
ing miracle of the spiritual creation, or what alone 
renders the creative name eternally adorable ; but 
regard it also, in its practical aspect, as the highest 
blessing capable of being bestowed by God upon 
man : as that blessing indeed which alone keeps every 
other blessing from becoming nauseous. Not moral 
or finite freedom — not a mere freedom of choice 
between good and evil, though this is of inestimable 
value as a basis of the other — but a positive or infi- 
nite freedom, which is without any ratio or limit, 
being identical with God's own presence in the 
created nature, and is felt in the created bosom, 
therefore, as the spontaneous prompting of its own 
spirit. 



LETTER III 




Y DEAR FRIEND: — To our natural, 
uneducated apprehension of Divine things, 
a proper inference from God's spiritual 
infinitude or perfection would be, that He 
might at once bestow what life He listed upon His 
creatures : if need were, a real and imperishable one. 
But an enlightened reason teaches us that every such 
judgment is superstitious or profane, springing from 
grossly sensuous notions of the Divine infinitude. 
We naturally think of God as the power of an out- 
ward life, and measure His good-will by his readi- 
ness to bestow all manner of outward prosperity 
upon His favorites. But He is in truth and pre- 
eminently the power of an inward life in man : that 
is to say, a life so little accentuated to the senses 
as to seem more innocent than infancy : and where 
there is no susceptibility in man to this inward 
life, His power of outward benefaction is thwarted. 
It is these sensuous prejudices of ours with respect 



THE MEANING OF INFINITE LOVE. 27 

to the Divine power which lead us to put such an 
exaggerated estimate as we do upon the gift of self- 
hood, as the sum of all God's outward bounty to 
the race; when the gift in question is without any 
objective reality, being one of pure subjective seem- 
ing. We want to know accordingly what precise 
exigency of the creative infinitude or perfection it 
is, which thus prevents the omnipotent Creator from 
fully authenticating the selfhood of man, or making 
him (in himself) anything but a mere form of sub- 
jective or seeming life. In other words our present 
business is to consider the creative infinitude, in order 
to ascertain the ground of its signal incapacity to con- 
fer upon its creatures (in themselves) any other than 
a subjective, personal, finite, or phenomenal conscious- 
ness. 

We are in the habit of saying that God the Cre- 
ator is infinite Love, but I doubt whether we are 
as prompt to understand all that is implied either 
in the qualifying adjective or the qualified noun. 
We say, indeed, that the Creator is Love, because 
He manifestly communicates life or being to other 
existences, who can have no manner of claim upon 
Him but what they derive from His own bountiful 
nature. But when we say His love is infinite, do 
we do so only by way of characterizing its pure 
quality, as being unalloyed by any fibre of self-love ; 



28 IT MEANS, FREEDOM FROM SELF-LOVE, 

that is to say, by any sentiment of conflict between 
Himself and others? Obviously there can be no 
essential or substantial conflict to the creative intel- 
ligence between Himself and His creatures, since 
He furnishes their sole and total being or substance. 
And any conflict which does ensue between them, 
therefore, must be purely formal or phenomenal, ex- 
isting to the created apprehension alone, and in- 
volving no compromise of the creative infinitude. 
This is accordingly the only ground of our ascrib- 
ing infinitude or perfection to the creative Love : 
that it is ineffably pure love, or love so wholly un- 
like ours, as to be absolutely free from any set-off 
or drawback of self-love, or even of transient self- 
regard. We say a thing is infinite, which has no 
subjective limitation, no limitation ab intra. And 
we say it is absolute, as having no objective limita- 
tion, no limitation ab extra. Now the Creator is 
in se, or essentially, both infinite, as being void of 
subjective relations; and absolute, as being void of 
objective relations ; and it is only in His existential 
relations to the finite understanding of His own 
creatures, that we apply these terms to Him, in 
order to express our approximate sense of His per- 
fect being, and so, in the best way we know how, 
differentiate Him from ourselves. 

Now this infinitude of the Creator constituting 



MSB HENCE STAMPS SELF- LO YE UNREAL. 29 

Him (in Himself) the all of being that exists, stamps 
the creature (in himself) a mere appearance or im- 
age of being, an abject phenomenal form or sem- 
blance of being, without a particle more reality in 
itself than the shadow which your or my person 
projects upon the ground, has in itself: that is, no 
philosophic, but a mere sensible or scientific reality. 
The creature exists sensibly to himself no doubt, and 
therefore claims to himself a scientific reality; but 
this existence, at best, is a strictly phenomenal or 
contingent existence, requiring an objective base or 
background to give it projection, or render it con- 
scious. The creature is rendered self-conscious by 
virtue of his subjection to his own body, or the out- 
lying world inherent in his bodily senses ; and so 
far of course is an authentic datum of science. But 
the inferiority of science to sense as a basis of spir- 
itual culture is signally evinced by the fact, that 
the testimony of sense is indisputable, while that 
of science is nothing if not disputable. Sense gives 
us all the existence we know ; science deals with the 
inferences or judgments which such existence renders 
probable, and hence presents an every way unstable 
or perilous, not to say impossible, base to men's spir- 
itual culture. For if spiritual truth is built, not 
upon the solid rock of natural fact, but upon the 
shifting sands of men's opinion, it would be absurd 



30 INFERIORITY OF SCIENCE TO PHILOSOPHY 

for us to attempt cultivating or even cherishing it, 
as it could never get body enough to become recog- 
nized by us, let alone loved. 

In spite, then, of the scientific authentication it 
claims — rather, let me say, in virtue of such au- 
thentication — created existence must be of a purely 
contingent, phenomenal, conscious character ; that is 
to say, can never be thought to include in itself its 
own being or substance. To make it include its 
own being or substance would be to pronounce it 
uncreated, in which case it would no longer be a 
product of infinite power but would itself possess 
infinitude. Creature would become converted into 
creator, in short : than which nothing more needs 
be said to demonstrate the logical absurdity of the 
position. The exact infirmity of science, regarded 
as a final or proper intellectual discipline of man, is 
that it is bound by its own limitation to ignore crea- 
tion, or make no account of the distinctively Divine 
implication in existence. This must forever estab- 
lish its essential inferiority to philosophy as an in- 
tellectual cultus. For the precise and characteristic 
research of philosophy is just that spiritual or crea- 
tive element in all existence which science is bound 
by the interests of self-preservation to overlook. Phi- 
losophy is nothing but a pursuit of the essential ends 
and causes that underlie and explain phenomena. 



AS AN INTELLECTUAL CULTUKE. 31 

Science confines herself only to phenomena and their 
relations, that is, to what is strictly verifiable in some 
sort by sense ; and so stigmatizes the pursuit of being 
or substance as fatal to her fundamental principles. 
Philosophy, in short, is the pursuit of Truth, super- 
sensuous truth, recognizable only by the heart of 
the race, or if by its intellect, still only through 
a life and power derived from the heart. Science 
has no eye for truth, but only for Fact, which is the 
appearance that truth puts on to the senses, and is 
therefore intrinsically second-hand, or shallow and 
reflective. To derive one's chief intellectual nur- 
ture from science, consequently, would be as unwise 
as to seek to know a man through a persistent study 
of his old clothes. It is, accordingly, a truth no 
way surprising to Philosophy that the creature, qua a 
creature, must be absolute nought in se, and become 
both conscious and cognizable only by virtue of the 
creative being or substance dwelling in him as him- 
self ': that is, in spiritually despised, rejected and cru- 
cified form. For the Creator in order to communi- 
cate His own wealth of being to the creature, is first 
obliged to give the creature a quasi or supposititious 
standing before Him, by making him at least self- 
conscious, or phenomenal to himself; and then by 
gradually revealing to him the abysmal death that 
is incident to this quasi or finite existence, win him 



32 MAN UNREAL IN SE, AND MADE EEAL 

to that hearty disgust of himself which is the inex- 
pugnable condition of his knowledge of — and sin- 
cere relish for- 5 — Divine things. 

I have shown you then that the creative power 
is inhibited by its own strict infinitude or perfec- 
tion, from allowing its creature any life more real 
than that of selfhood, or mere subjective seeming : 
because to do this would be to disjoin its creature 
from itself, or render him independent of his sole 
source of life. I confess I do not see how, if you 
acknowledge the truth of creation at all, but espe- 
cially acknowledge it to be spiritual or living, you 
can help agreeing with what I have said. And if 
you agree with me that man — being a creature — 
is not, and in the very nature of things, can never 
be, his own spiritual being or substance : then, as 
it strikes me, the main obstacle will be removed to 
our general agreement in the fundamental postulate 
of Christianity, which is the sole Divinity of Christ's 
Humanity. That is to say, we shall both alike be 
able to perceive, that as all men like you and me 
naturally feel that personal or egoistic substance 
(being the least material or most vitalized substance 
they know) is veritable Divine substance, and does 
really constitute their own deeply recognized and 
highly prized Divine being : so the most urgent obli- 
gation which this natural hallucination of the created 



ONLY BY NATURAL REDEMPTION. 33 

intelligence imposes upon the Creator, is eventually 
to redeem His creature from the overpowering bond- 
age of self, and the utter spiritual blight it en- 
genders, by fully incarnating His own perfection in 
the nature of the creature, and from that "coign of 
"vantage" gradually glorifying the consciousness of 
the latter out of personal into race dimensions; out 
of selfish into social form and order. 

Now I shall not affront your self-respect by affect- 
ing to demonstrate the truth of God's natural 
humanity scientifically : in the first place, because 
it is not a fact of sense, and therefore escapes the 
supervision of science ; and in the second place, be- 
cause in all this correspondence, I am anxious to 
conciliate your heart primarily, while your head is 
quite a subordinate aim. I cannot tell you a single 
reason, unprompted by the heart, why I myself be- 
lieve the truth in question, or any other truth for 
that matter ; and so far as my own pleasure is con- 
cerned, accordingly, I would not give a fig for your 
acknowledgment of it, if the acknowledgment did not 
betray a like cordial source. In fact, I believe it 
simply because I love it, or it seems adorably good 
to me ; and once having learned to love it, I could 
not do without it. It would in truth kill me, intel- 
lectually, to doubt it. So you see I am at least dis- 
interested in my advocacy of the truth. I recom- 



34 PRIMACY OF THE HEART IN BELIEF. 

mend it to you for its own sake exclusively, and not 
at all for yours. It may indeed, for aught I know, 
prove as odious to you as it is precious to me ; and 
God forbid that I should take it upon me to say 
you nay, whatever way your heart inclines you. To 
my experience this is the only thing that in the long 
run authenticates truth to the intellect — the heart's 
sincere craving for it. I find that truth unloved is 
always at bottom truth unbelieved, however much it 
may be "professed." In short, I am persuaded 
that there is no more galling bondage known to the 
intellect, than that of truth unsanctioned and unsoft- 
ened by affection ; and I don't the least wonder at 
Swedenborg — when describing men in a freer world 
than this, however — saying that they willingly 
plunge into the depths of hell to be rid of it. 



LETTER IV, 




REE your mind, then, at once and utterly, 
so far as I am concerned, of all apprehen- 
sion of being reasoned into truth, or hav- 
ing your understanding coerced against 
your heart's consent. Ratiocination is doubtless an 
honest pastime, or it would not be so much in vogue 
as a means of acquiring truth. But the truth we 
are elucidating is Divine, and therefore is great 
enough to authenticate itself, or furnish its own evi- 
dence. Divine truth, to be sure, must always be 
unpopular or out of fashion, so long as God is the 
simply merciful or magnanimous being He is. But 
if it had to be acquired at the same cost to mind 
and body that scientific truth exacts, — if the result 
involved an equally wide field of sensible induction, 
an equally studious observation of particulars, the 
same painstaking investigation of evidence, and the 
same power to formulate a just conclusion, — there 
would be still fewer persons to pursue it, and com- 



36 DIVINE TRUTH HAS FIRST TO CREATE 

paratively few of these again would feel very secure 
of their results. 

But the case is widely different. Divine truth, 
simply because it is Divine, has first to create the 
intelligence that recognizes it, and therefore releases 
its votaries from that costly and toilsome research 
which is demanded by science. It takes nature or 
the senses for granted, and the will and understand- 
ing in man: but that is the sum of its exactions. 
For it propagates itself by the method of Revelation 
exclusively : that is, by gradually unveiling to human 
intelligence the spiritual sense or meaning which is 
latent in all natural symbols : and hence desiderates 
no preparation in its disciples but a modest and 
docile intelligence. Its entire aim is to lay a foun- 
dation for men's spiritual life, by first disabusing 
them of their sensuous prejudices, and the selfish, 
untender science which is begotten of these; and 
consequently it makes no direct appeal to their con- 
ceited intelligence, but seeks to cure their spiritual 
disability by first purifying their hearts of the evil 
loves which engender it. 

Thus the sole disciplinary apparatus of Divine 
Truth is detergent or purgative, being fully embodied 
in the ten commandments. He would very grossly 
mistake the purpose of "the moral law," as we 
term it, which is the basis of our existing civili- 



THE INTELLIGENCE IT AFTERWARDS ENLIGHTENS. 37 

zation, who should fail to discern its intensely spirit- 
ual animus, as intended above all things to bring 
about a change of heart in the votary. By the irre- 
sistible bent of their finite nature the affections of 
men are obdurately set upon perishing things, and 
the main design of the law therefore is to convince 
them of this death -bearing nature they carry about 
in themselves, and fix their attention upon a great 
natural deliverance to be accomplished for them in 
the fulness of time by the infinite Divine mercy. 
Thus in the sacred or symbolic Hebrew Scriptures, 
the law is always prefaced by the assertion of a great 
figurative redemption Divinely wrought. " And God 
spake all these words, saying: i", the Lord thy God, 
have brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the 
house of bondage!' This is the law's supreme sanc- 
tion, and its invariable challenge to the imagination 
of its votary, that the spiritual Creator of men — He 
who is their true but unseen being — is their nat- 
ural Redeemer as well, giving them deliverance first 
from the infirmities and corruptions incident to their 
finite generation, as the indispensable condition of 
their truly fulfilling it. Then in strict accordance 
with this majestic proem, the letter of the law goes 
on to indicate to its intelligent subject, first, those 
dispositions of heart and mind which befit this great 
deliverance : namely, a sentiment of tender awe and 



38 ITS FORCE PURELY REGENERATIVE. 

reverence for his adorable Divine Redeemer, of 
deference to his natural elders and superiors, and 
of brotherhood or impartial fellowship to his natu- 
ral equals : and, secondly, sums up and stigmatizes 
to his eternal abhorrence the four or five generic 
forms of evil action which alone perpetuate the sway 
of his old nature, and therefore vitiate his experience 
of the regenerate life. And now mark what the 
comment of the New Testament upon this Old Tes- 
tament legal Divine administration is, namely: that 
every subject of the law — who so far failed to sym- 
pathize with its spiritual scope as a discipline of the 
heart in man in including all men without excep- 
tion under sin, as nevertheless to make a boast of its 
letter in giving some men a conscience of righteous- 
ness — was Divinely rejected. 

Of course we no longer live under a literal admin- 
istration of Divine things, but an overtly spiritual 
one. But our ecclesiastical leaders are apparently 
blind to this patent fact, being determined to eter- 
nize this inveterate Jewish itch after a carnal right- 
eousness, such as may distinguish Christians out- 
wardly no less than inwardly from other men. The 
skulking and beggarly way they take to gratify this 
evil concupiscence, is by reorganizing the law — 
considered as the unchanged and indefeasible ground 
of man's justification — under the specious mask of 



PERSISTENT JUDAISM OF THE CHURCH. 39 

a Christian " profession/' or the duty which believers 
owe their faith "to profess Christ" before the world, 
and so mortify the secular spirit within them. And 
we may frankly appeal accordingly to any of the 
more flagrant types of the Christian "profession" 
among us, to confirm and illustrate the New Testa- 
ment affirmation of the profound spiritual death and 
damnation that inhere in every attempt to compass 
a literal or personal holiness at the Divine hands. 

I will not cite the frequent testimony of our 
newspapers to show how common an instinct of 
the public mind it is to feel, that a man's practical 
morality invites close scrutiny the moment he be- 
comes any way conspicuous as claiming a profes- 
sional sanctity. And it is in fact growing a ludi- 
crous spectacle, to see how an almost fatal Divine 
nemesis pursues those who abound in the ways of 
the current self-righteousness, or achieve a place of 
honor in the ranks of technical piety, until they turn 
out very often an actual stench in men's nostrils for 
their grossly immoral practices. But I prefer to 
shut my eyes to these catastrophes in the moral or 
subjective sphere, in order to look behind them at 
what may be regarded as their root. The moral 
experience of man has been hitherto completely sub- 
servient to the needs of his spiritual freedom, or his 
growth in humility and tender reverence for the 



40 "PROFESSIONAL" EELIGION 

Divine name; and now that this freedom is inflow- 
ing into the human mind in unexampled measure, 
it is not to be wondered at that those who are 
insensible and indifferent to the Divine substance 
should be equally insensible and indifferent to th 
genuine morality which has been its human type. 
But, bad as these moral obliquities are, I am per- 
suaded that the interests of spiritual religion are far 
more deeply compromised in the world by those of its 
" professors " who are not practically immoral, but con- 
trive on the contrary to enjoy the esteem of their 
friends while they live, and to die — when they die 
— in the odor of a corrupt conventional sanctity. 

The only danger to the spirit of religion (and this 
is a danger that besets every inward grace of man- 
hood) comes from the effort of the soul to assume and 
cherish a devout ^^-consciousness ; or so to abound in 
a religious sense, as to incur the imputation of religi- 
osity or superstition. This is the inalienable vice of 
professional religion, the only sincere fruit it is capa- 
ble of bringing forth. The evil spirit which religion 
is primarily intended to exorcise in us is the spirit 
of selfhood, based upon a most inadequate apprehen- 
sion of its strictly provisional uses to our spiritual 
nurture. The gradual conquest or slaying of this 
unholy spirit of self in man is the sole function 
which religion proposes to itself during his natural 









THE TRUE ANTICHRIST. 41 

life; and without taxing oar co-operation too se- 
verely, it yet gives us enough to do before its benig- 
nant mission is fully wrought out. Such being 
the invariable office of the religious instinct, profes- 
sional religion steps in to simulate its sway, and with 
an air all the while of even canting deference, pro- 
ceeds to build again the things which were destroyed, 
by reorganizing man's selfhood on a more specious 
or consecrated basis, and so authenticating all its 
unslain lusts in a way of devotion to the conventicle, 
at least, if not to the open, undisguised world. 

Professional religion thus stamps itself the devil's 
subtlest device for keeping the human soul in bond- 
age. Religion says death — inward or spiritual 
death — to the selfhood in man. Professional relig- 
ion says: "Nay, not death, above all not inward or 
spiritual — because this would be living — death, and 
obviously the selfhood must live in order to be vivi- 
fied of God. By no means therefore let us say an 
inward or living death to selfhood, but an outward 
or quasi death, professionally or ritually enacted, and 
so operating a change of base for the selfhood. Self- 
hood doubtless has been hitherto based upon a most 
unrighteous enmity on the part of the world to God, 
and has of itself shared the enmity. Let man then 
only acknowledge, professionally or ritually, this 
wicked enmity of the world to God, and he may 



RITUALISM, REVIVALISM, RADICALISM. 



keep Iris selfhood unimpaired and unchallenged, to 
expand and flourish in secula seculorum." 

Professional religion, I repeat, is the devil's mas- 
terpiece for ensnaring silly, selfish men. The ugly 
beast has two heads ■ one called Ritualism, intended 
to devour a finer and fastidious style of men, men of 
sentiment and decorum, cherishing scrupulously mod- 
erate views of the difference between man and God ; 
the other called Revivalism, with a great red mouth 
intended to gobble up a coarser sort of men, men 
for the most part of a fierce carnality, of ungovern- 
able appetite and passion, susceptible at best only 
of the most selfish hopes, and the most selfish fears, 
towards God. I must say, we are not greatly dev- 
astated here in Boston — though occasionally vexed 
— by either head of the beast ; on the contrary, it 
is amusing enough to observe how afraid the great 
beast himself is of being pecked to pieces on our 
streets by a little indigenous bantam-cock which calls 
itself Radicalism, and which struts, and crows, and 
scratches gravel in a manner so bumptious and per- 
emptory, that I defy any ordinary barnyard chanti- 
cleer to imitate it. 

But I am forgetting to answer your doubt in 
relation to the Christian truth, which is the wholly 
spiritual truth of God's natural humanity. 



LETTER V 




T DEAR FRIEND: — I will introduce 
what I have to say to you in regard to 
the genesis of my religious faith, by re- 
citing a fact of experience, interesting in 
itself no doubt in a psychological point of view, but 
particularly interesting to my imagination as mark- 
ing the interval between my merely rationalistic in- 
terest in Divine things, and the subsequent struggle 
of my heart after a more intimate and living knowl- 
edge of them. 

In the spring of 1844 I was living with my family 
in the neighborhood of Windsor, England, much 
absorbed in the study of the Scriptures. Two or 
three years before this period I had made an im- 
portant discovery, as I fancied, namely: that the 
book of Genesis was not intended to throw a direct 
light upon our natural or race history, but was an 
altogether mystical or symbolic record of the laws 
of God's spiritual creation and providence. I wrote 



44 SUDDEN DEMORALIZATION 

a course of lectures in exposition of this idea, and 
delivered them to good audiences in New York. 
The preparation of these lectures, while it did much 
to confirm me in the impression that I had made 
an interesting discovery, and one which would ex- 
tensively modify theology, convinced me, however, 
that a much more close and studious application 
of my idea than I had yet given to the illustration 
of the details of the sacred letter was imperatively 
needed. During my residence abroad, accordingly, 
I never tired in my devotion to this aim, and my 
success seemed so flattering at length that I hoped 
to be finally qualified to contribute a not insignificant 
mite to the sum of man's highest knowledge. I 
remember I felt especially hopeful in the prosecution 
of my task all the time I was at Windsor; my 
health was good, my spirits cheerful, and the pleas- 
ant scenery of the Great Park and its neighbor- 
hood furnished us a constant temptation to long 
walks and drives. 

One day, however, towards the close of May, hav- 
ing eaten a comfortable dinner, I remained sitting 
at the table after the family had dispersed, idly 
gazing at the embers in the grate, thinking of noth- 
ing, and feeling only the exhilaration incident to 
a good digestion, when suddenly — in a lightning- 
flash as it were — " fear came upon me, and trem- 



OF THE WRITER. 45 



bling, which made all my bones to shake." To all 
appearance it was a perfectly insane and abject terror, 
without ostensible cause, and only to be accounted 
for, to my perplexed imagination, by some damned 
shape squatting invisible to me within the precincts 
of the room, and raying out from his fetid personality 
influences fatal to life. The thing had not lasted ten 
seconds before I felt myself a wreck, that is, re- 
duced from a state of firm, vigorous, joyful man- 
hood to one of almost helpless infancy. The only 
self-control I was capable of exerting was to keep 
my seat. I felt the greatest desire to run inconti- 
nently to the foot of the stairs and shout for help 
to my wife, — to run to the roadside even, and ap- 
peal to the public to protect me; but by an im- 
mense effort I controlled these frenzied impulses, 
and determined not to budge from my chair till I 
had recovered my lost self-possession. This pur- 
pose I held to for a good long hour, as I reckoned 
time, beat upon meanwhile by an ever-growing 
tempest of doubt, anxiety, and despair, with abso- 
lutely no relief from any truth I had ever encoun- 
tered save a most pale and distant glimmer of the 
Divine existence, — when I resolved to abandon the 
vain struggle, and communicate without more ado 
what seemed my sudden burden of inmost, impla- 
cable unrest to my wife. 



46 ALMOST COMPLETE MORAL IMBECILITY. 

Now, to make a long story short, this ghastly con- 
dition of mind continued with me, with gradually 
lengthening intervals of relief, for two years, and even 
longer. I consulted eminent physicians, who told 
me that I had doubtless overworked my brain, an 
evil for which no remedy existed in medicine, but 
only in time, and patience, and growth into improved 
physical conditions. They all recommended by way 
of hygiene a resort to the water-cure treatment, a 
life in the open air, cheerful company, and so forth, 
and thus quietly and skilfully dismissed me to my 
own spiritual medication. At first, when I began 
to feel a half-hour's respite from acute mental an- 
guish, the bottomless mystery of my disease com- 
pletely fascinated me. The more, however, I wor- 
ried myself with speculations about the cause of it, 
the more the mystery deepened, and the deeper 
also grew my instinct of resentment at what seemed 
so needless an interference with my personal lib- 
erty. I went to a famous water-cure, which did 
nothing towards curing my malady but enrich 
my memory with a few morbid specimens of Eng- 
lish insularity and prejudice, but it did much to 
alleviate it by familiarizing my senses with the ex- 
quisite and endless charm of English landscape, and 
giving me my first full rational relish of what may 
be called England's pastoral beauty. To be sure 



CHARM OF ENGLISH LANDSCAPE. 47 

I had spent a few days in Devonshire when I was 
young, but my delight then was simple enthusi- 
asm, was helpless aesthetic intoxication in fact. The 
" cure " was situated in a much less lovely but still 
beautiful country, on the borders of a famous park, 
to both of which, moreover, it gave you unlimited 
right of possession and enjoyment. At least this 
was the way it always struck my imagination. The 
thoroughly disinterested way the English have of 
looking at their own hills and vales, — the indiffer- 
ent, contemptuous, and as it were disowning mood 
they habitually put on towards the most ravishing 
pastoral loveliness man's sun anywhere shines upon, 
— gave me always the sense of being a discoverer 
of these things, and of a consequent right to enter 
upon their undisputed possession. At all events 
the rich light and shade of English landscape, the 
gorgeous cloud-pictures that forever dimple and di- 
versify her fragrant and palpitating bosom, have 
awakened a tenderer chord in me than I have ever 
felt at home almost j and time and again while living 
at this dismal water-cure, and listening to its end- 
less "strife of tongues" about diet, and regimen, 
and disease, and politics, and parties, and persons, 
I have said to myself: The curse of mankind, that 
ivhich keeps our manhood so little and so depraved, 
is its sense of selfhood, and the absurd abominable 



48 GROWING DELIGHT IN NATURE, 

qpinionativeness it engenders. How sweet it would be 
to find oneself no longer man, but one of those inno- 
cent and ignorant sheep pasturing upon that placid 
hillside, and drinking in eternal dew and freshness 
from nature s lavish bosom ! 

But let me hasten to the proper upshot of this 
incident. My stay at the water-cure, unpromising 
as it was in point of physical results, made me con- 
scious erelong of a most important change operating 
in the sphere of my will and understanding. It 
struck me as very odd, soon after my breakdown, that 
I should feel no longing to resume the work which 
had been interrupted by it ; and from that day to 
this — nearly thirty-five years — I have never once 
cast a retrospective glance, even of curiosity, at the 
immense piles of manuscript which had erewhile 
so absorbed me. I suppose if any one had desig- 
nated me previous to that event as an earnest seeker 
after truth, I should myself have seen nothing un- 
becoming in the appellation. But now — within 
two or three months of my catastrophe — I felt sure 
I had never caught a glimpse of truth. My present 
consciousness was exactly that of an utter and plenary 
destitution of truth. Indeed an ugly suspicion had 
more than once forced itself upon me, that I had 
never really wished the truth, but only to ventilate 
my own ability in discovering it. I was getting sick 



AND DISGUST WITH ONESELF. 49 



to death in fact with a sense of my downright intel- 
lectual poverty and dishonesty. My studious mental 
activity had served manifestly to base a mere " castle 
in the air," and the castle had vanished in a brief 
bitter moment of time, leaving not a wrack behind. 
I never felt again the most passing impulse, even, to 
look where it stood, having done with it forever. 
Truth indeed! How should a beggar like me be 
expected to discover it? How should any man of 
woman born pretend to such ability? Truth must 
reveal itself if it would be known, and even then 
how imperfectly known at best ! For truth is God, 
the omniscient and omnipotent God, and who shall 
pretend to comprehend that great and adorable per- 
fection? And yet who that aspires to the name of 
man, would not cheerfully barter all he knows of life 
for a bare glimpse of the hem of its garment ? 

I was calling one day upon a friend (since de- 
ceased) who lived in the vicinity of the water-cure — 
a lady of rare qualities of heart and mind, and of 
singular personal loveliness as well — who desired 
to know what had brought me to the water-cure. 
After I had done telling her in substance what I 
have told you, she replied : " It is, then, very much 
as I had ventured from two or three previous things 
you have said, to suspect : you are undergoing what 
Swedenborg calls a vastation j and though, naturally 



50 A FRIEND'S ACCOUNT OF SWEDENBORG. 

enough, you yourself are despondent or even despair- 
ing about the issue, I cannot help taking an altogether 
hopeful view of your prospects." In expressing my 
thanks for her encouraging words, I remarked that I 
was not at all familiar with the Swedenborgian tech- 
nics, and that I should be extremely happy if she 
would follow up her flattering judgment of my con- 
dition by turning into plain English the contents of 
the very handsome Latin word she had used. To 
this she again modestly replied that she only read 
Swedenborg as an amateur, and was ill-qualified to 
expound his philosophy, but there could be no doubt 
about its fundamental postulate, which was, that a new 
birth for man, both in the individual and the uni- 
versal realm, is the secret of the Divine creation and 
providence : that the other world, according to Swe- 
denborg, furnishes the true sphere of man's spiritual 
or individual being, the real and immortal being he 
has in God ; and he represents this world, conse- 
quently, as furnishing only a preliminary theatre of 
his natural formation or existence in subordination 
thereto ; so making the question of human regenera- 
tion, both in grand and in little, the capital problem 
of philosophy : that, without pretending to dog- 
matize, she had been struck with the philosophic 
interest of my narrative in this point of view, and 
had used the word vastation to characterize one of 



I AM MUCH INTERESTED. 51 

the stages of the regenerative process, as she had 
found it described by Swedenborg. And then, 
finally, my excellent friend went on to outline for 
me, in a very interesting manner, her conception of 
Swedenborg's entire doctrine on the subject. 

Her account of it, as I found on a subsequent 
study of Swedenborg, was neither quite as exact nor 
quite as comprehensive as the facts required ; but at 
all events I was glad to discover that any human 
being had so much even as proposed to shed the 
light of positive knowledge upon the soul's history, 
or bring into rational relief the alternate dark and 
bright — or infernal and celestial — phases of its 
finite constitution. For I had an immediate hope, 
amounting to an almost prophetic instinct, of finding 
in the attempt, however rash, some diversion to my 
cares, and I determined instantly to run up to Lon- 
don and procure a couple of Swedenborg's volumes, 
of which, if I should not be allowed on sanitary 
grounds absolutely to read them, I might at any 
rate turn over the leaves, and so catch a satisfying 
savor, or at least an appetizing flavor, of the possible 
relief they might in some better clay afford to my 
poignant need. From the huge mass of tomes placed 
by the bookseller on the counter before me, I selected 
two of the least in bulk — the treatise on the Divine 
Love and Wisdom, and that on the Divine Providence. 



52 I RESOLVE TO READ HIM. 

I gave them, after I brought them home, many a 
random but eager glance, but at last my interest in 
them grew so frantic under this tantalizing process 
of reading that I resolved, in spite of the doctors, 
that, instead of standing any longer shivering on the 
brink, I would boldly plunge into the stream, and 
ascertain, once for all, to what undiscovered sea its 
waters might bear me. 



LETTER VI 




Y DEAR FRIEND: — I read from the 
first with palpitating interest. My heart 
divined, even before my intelligence was 
prepared to do justice to the books, the 
unequalled amount of truth to be found in them. 
Imagine a fever patient, sufficiently restored of his 
malady to be able to think of something beside him- 
self, suddenly transported where the free airs of 
heaven blow upon him, and the sound of running 
waters refreshes his jaded senses, and you have a 
feeble image of my delight in reading. Or, better 
still, imagine a subject of some petty despotism con- 
demned to die, and with — what is more and worse 
— a sentiment of death pervading all his conscious- 
ness, lifted by a sudden miracle into felt harmony 
with universal man, and filled to the brim with the 
sentiment of indestructible life instead, and you will 
have a true picture of my emancipated condition. 
Eor while these remarkable books familiarized me 



54 A FEW EXPLANATORY WORDS 

with the angelic conception of the Divine being and 
providence, they gave me at the same time the 
amplest rationale I could have desired of my own 
particular suffering, as inherent in the profound un- 
conscious death I bore about in my projmum or self- 
hood. 

— Here let me interpose a few words of caution. 
I have not the least ambition to set myself up as 
Swedenborg's personal attorney or solicitor. Swe- 
denborg himself is not the least a fascinating per- 
sonality to my regard, and if I were able by skilful 
palaver to reason you out of an unfavorable into 
a favorable estimate of his personal genius and 
worth, I should prefer not to do it ; because just in 
proportion as you concede any personal authority 
to a writer you are unlikely to be spiritually helped 
by him. You are sure, in fact, to be spiritually 
enfeebled by him. Besides, I am persuaded that, 
notwithstanding Swedenborg's personal limitations as 
measured by the taste of our day, his amazing books 
will suffer by no man's neglect, were he the most 
considerable man of his time in religion, in science, 
and in philosophy. And I should think myself very 
ill employed, therefore, in drumming up a regiment 
of raw recruits to dim their patient lustre, or degrade 
it to the glitter of the gutters. His books invite the 
most opposite appreciation, for they have all the 



ABOUT SWEDENBORG. 55 

breadth and variety of nature in their aspect — now 
smiling with celestial peace, now grim with infernal 
storm and wrath. But they have always a light 
above nature, that is to say, not only above this realm 
of mixed good and evil which we call the natural 
world, but also above that realm of divided good and 
evil to which we give the name of the spiritual world ; 
and in this Divine light we may discern, if we are 
attentive, an objective reconciliation of infinite and 
finite, which shall finally blot all memory, either of 
a mixed or a divided good and evil, forever out of 
mind. 

At the moment I am speaking of — the moment 
of my first encounter with Swedenborg's writings — 
my intellect had been so completely vastated of every 
semblance of truth inherited from the past, and my 
soul consequently was in a state of such sheer and 
abject famine with respect to Divine things, that I 
doubt not I should have welcomed " the father of 
lies " to my embrace, nor ever have cared to scruti- 
nize his credentials, had he presented himself bear- 
ing the priceless testimony which these books bear 
to the loveliness and grandeur of the Divine name. 
Nor should I counsel any one, who is not similarly 
dilapidated in his intellectual foundations — any one 
who is still at rest in his hereditary bed of doctrine, 
orthodox or heterodox — to pay the least attention 



56 A FEW EXPLANATORY WORDS 

to them. For on the surface they repel delight. 
They would seem to have been mercifully constructed 
on the plan of barring out idle acquaintance, and 
disgusting a voluptuous literary curiosity. But to 
the aching heart and the void mind — the heart and 
mind which, being sensibly famished upon those 
gross husks of religious doctrine whether Orthodox 
or Unitarian, upon which nevertheless our veriest 
swine are contentedly fed, are secretly pining for 
their Father's house where there is bread enough 
and to spare — they will be sure, I think, to bring 
infinite balm and contentment. I am confident that 
no such readers will ever care to discuss any ques- 
tion which is properly personal to Swedenborg. 

I disdain to argue, then, with you or anybody 
else, in regard to Swedenborg, on general or a priori 
principles. Think what you will, and say what you 
will, of his dogmatic pretensions — make him out 
if it please you, in the abundance of your self-satis- 
faction, either a knave or a fool or both — the judg- 
ment it is true may give out a strong subjective 
flavor, but I have something better to do than to 
argue it on its objective merits. Besides, I take it 
that no man is eager to argue a question about which 
he himself has not at least some secret misgiving. 
And I have no more misgiving, either secret or open, 
in regard to Swedenborg's teaching, than the new- 



ABOUT SWEDENBORG. 57 

born babe has in regard to its mother's milk. He 
has moreover so effectually vulgarized to my mind 
the inmost significance of heaven and hell by expos- 
ing their purely provisio?ial character and contents, 
that I should feel myself wanting both in proper 
self-respect and proper homage to the Divine name, 
if I continued to cherish anything but a strictly 
scientific curiosity with regard to angel or devil; 
or viewed it as the consummation of my being to 
be eternally associated with the one and eternally 
separated from the other. 

In thus avowing my free conviction of the im- 
mortal services Swedenborg has rendered to the 
mind, I confess I should be greatly mortified if you 
looked upon this avowal as a " profession of faith " in 
him, or as an ascription on my part of any more 
dogmatic authority to him than I should ascribe 
in their various measure to Socrates or John Mill. 
He reports himself as interviewing, by special Divine 
appointment, spirits and angels and devils in re- 
spect to what they could attest each in their degree, 
whether consciously or unconsciously, of the prin- 
ciples of the world's administration. Thus he is 
at best a mere informer or reporter, though an 
egregiously intelligent one, in the interest of a new 
evolution of the human mind, speculative and prac- 
tical; and his testimony, therefore, to the spiritual 



58 A FEW. EXPLANATORY WORDS 

truth of the case, however much it may attract your 
confidence both in respect to its general competence 
and its palpable veracity, is not for an instant to be 
regarded as a revelation, or confounded with living 
Divine truth. The sphere of Revelation is the 
sphere of life exclusively, and its truth is addressed 
not to the reflective understanding of men, but to 
their living perception. Truth, to every soul that 
has ever felt its inward breathing, disowns all out- 
ward authority, — disowns, if need be, all outward 
probability or attestation of Fact. The only witness 
it craves, and this witness it depends upon, is that 
of good in the heart ; and it allows no lower or less 
decisive attestation. Swedenborg, at all events, is 
incapable of the effrontery thus imputed to him. 
Nothing could have awakened a blush of deeper 
resentment on his innocent brow, if he could have 
foreseen the outrage, than the base spirit of sect, 
which in the face of his honest denunciations of it 
ventures to renew its unhallowed empire by clothing 
him with Divine authority. 

The pretension to authority in intellectual things 
belongs exclusively to the Romish Church; and it 
has of late grown so reckless and wanton even in 
that hysterical suburb, as to show that it has no 
longer any faith in itself, but is clung to only as 
a desperate commercial speculation. If, accordingly, 



ABOUT SWEDENBORG. 59 

any taint of this spiritual dry-rot attached to these 
transparent books, I should advise you to send author 
and books, both alike, into the land of forgetfulness. 
It is not conceivable that the Divine providence 
should deliberately endow a quack to further his 
wise designs towards the intellect of the race. And 
every man in this day of restored spiritual liberty, 
and with the doomed papacy before him, who yet 
apes its blasphemy, so far as to claim either for 
himself or another a delegated Divine authority over 
the reason and conscience of men, must be a double- 
distilled quack ; that is, knave and fool both ; though 
he may not have perspicacity enough to suspect him- 
self of either obliquity. Indeed, none but a truly 
wise man ever suspects himself of being a fool, and 
none but a truly good man has courage to avow him- 
self a knave; so that if the world could once get 
fairly defecated of its unconscious knaves and fools, 
we should have only good men and wise left behind. 
At all events, Swedenborg is conspicuously free 
of this vulgarity. His own faith is vowed unaf- 
fectedly and exclusively to the one sole and consum- 
mate revelation of the Divine name, made in the 
gospel of Jesus Christ ; and he is not such a silly 
and vicious he-goat, accordingly, as to go about 
peddling a rival revelation. His sole intellectual 
pretension is to emphasize the eternal lustre of the 



60 A FEW EXPLANATORY WORDS 

gospel to men's regard, by disclosing its interior or 
spiritual and philosophic contents, as they became 
known to him through the opening of his spiritual 
senses. Take particular notice, therefore : what any 
honest mind goes to these sincere books for is, not 
to find any Divine warrant there either for his faith 
or his practice, for every man's own heart alone is 
competent to that question ; much less to discover 
in them any new deodorizing substance which will 
disguise the stale fetor of ecclesiasticism or sacerdo- 
talism, and so commend it anew to men's revolted 
nostrils ; but all simply to find light upon the philos- 
ophy of the gospel, or ascertain what its internal or 
universal and impersonal contents are, of the truth of 
which contents he himself is all the while his own 
sole and divinely empowered arbiter. 

And here a proper caution must be used, lest one 
run headlong into an exaggerated or superstitious 
estimate of Swedenborg's books, even from their 
own point of view. For it is past all dispute that 
Swedcnborg himself had at best only a most general 
and obscure notion of the benefit which was to accrue 
to the mind of man, on earth and in heaven, from 
the last Judgment whose operation in the world of 
spirits he so minutely describes. The immediate 
chaotic or revolutionary effects of the Judgment ap- 
parently so absorbed his attention as to leave him 



ABOUT SWEDENBORG-. 61 

neither leisure nor inclination, even if he had had 
the power, to prognosticate its redeeming virtue upon 
the progress of the human mind. But he had no 
such prophetic faculty, even in reference to the events 
he was daily witnessing in the world of spirits, much 
less, therefore, in reference to the contingencies of 
God's order in this lower or universal world. In- 
deed, he tells us that when he asked the angels what 
their judgment was, as to the specific effects which 
would follow upon earth from the events occurring 
in the world of spirits, they were completely unable 
to satisfy his curiosity in that behalf. They replied, 
in effect, that tliey knew just as little of the specific 
future as he did — future events being present only 
to the Divine mind — and that all they felt sure 
of in general was, that the old spiritual tyranny 
under which the human mind had been so helplessly 
stifled, being now at last effectually dissipated by 
the breaking up of the ecclesiastical heavens, Popish 
and Protestant alike, freethinking in religious things 
would be henceforth the divinely guaranteed basis 
of the Church on earth. And if freethinking or 
scepticism in religious things — the things of the 
intellect — be henceforth the normal attitude of the 
natural mind as a consequence of the last Judgment, 
surely nothing could have well seemed more pre- 
posterous to Swedenborg than to think of ever again 
elevating the discredited banner of Authority. 



62 A FEW EXPLANATORY WORDS 

Conceive of Swedenborg then, personally, as you 
will, and welcome. What alone I care about is not 
to interest your intelligence in anything that is per- 
sonal to the devout and estimable old seer, but in 
his performances. I feel, indeed, a perfect indiffer- 
ence to all his private claims upon attention. But 
my gratitude and admiration are immense for what 
he has done to flood the human mind with light 
out of inscrutable darkness, upon the question of 
our human origin and destiny ; upon every question, 
in fact, involved in a true cosmology, or permanent 
science of the relations which exist between the world 
of thought and the world of substance. But then, 
remember, there is no access to this light but through 
honest research, guided by the felt needs of your 
intellect, and not by any idle literary curiosity, or 
mere silly ambition to know what other people know, 
and to be able to talk about what they talk about. 
Above all, let me counsel you to avoid, as you would 
avoid a fog, every flippant jackanapes who is ecclesi- 
astically ordained (or unordained by the holy Ghost) 
to minister truth to you. The ecclesiastical spirit, 
and the civic spirit bred of it, are now the only evil 
spirits upon earth, and they are no longer compati- 
ble with any living knowledge of truth. Indeed, no 
man can outwardly communicate truth to his neigh- 
bor, much less any whose profession it is to do so, 



ABOUT SWEDENBORG. 63 

however skilled he may be to communicate scientific 
information. Tor truth is living, spiritual, Divine, 
being shaped to every one's intelligence only by what 
he has of celestial love in his heart. Thus Sweden- 
borg will doubtless give you any amount of inter- 
esting and enlightening information about the spirit- 
ual world, and its principles of administration. And 
this knowledge taken into your memory, or mental 
stomach, will constitute so much nutritive material 
to be intellectually assimilated by you, when the 
living truth itself has begun to germinate and sprout 
in your heart. But as to actually communicating 
the truth to you — or making it literally over to 
your understanding — Swedenborg is of course just 
as flatly incompetent to that function as every other 
man of woman born, and even more incapable mor- 
ally, if that be possible, than he was intellectually, 
of making any such blasphemous claim. 



LETTER VII 




Y DEAR FRIEND: — I have not lost 
sight of my subject, as you doubtless by 
this time suspect, and we shall soon re- 
turn to it. But, as I told you in my first 
letter, my nervous force is very much abated at pres- 
ent, and I am obliged to write not exactly as I would, 
but as my defective energy permits me. Besides, 
even if my nerves were unimpaired, it would be 
within the strict logic of my theme to hold a little 
discourse with you about Swedenborg and the relation 
of my thought to his books, since he is the only man, 
as it seems to me, in human history who has shed any 
commanding or decisive light on the physiology of 
the soul. That is to say, his books set before you, as 
no other books have the least pretension to do, certain 
facts of spiritual observation and experience which 
must, if you read them with interested attention, very 
soon convince you that you, like all other men, have 
hitherto utterly misconceived the function of selfhood 



FURTHER OBSERVATIONS. 65 

in man, and hence have attributed an original or caus- 
ative influence, instead of a purely ancillary or minis- 
terial one, to morality in human affairs. Observe 
what I say. It is exclusively these facts of spiritual 
observation and experience, recounted by Swedenborg, 
lohich produce the effect in question, and not the least 
any reasoning of his own in regard to the facts. For 
this is what Swedenborg never does, namely, reason 
about the things he professes to have learned from 
angels and spirits. It may betoken great wisdom or 
great imbecility in him to your mind that he does 
not; but such, nevertheless, is the fact. He never 
once, so far as I have observed, has attempted to throw 
a persuasive light upon the things he professes to 
have heard and seen among his angelic acquaintance. 
Indeed, his own intellectual relation to the facts is 
left altogether undetermined in his books. There can 
be no doubt that the things he learned diffused an 
atmosphere of great peace and sweetness in his breast, 
and this makes his books the most heavenly reading I 
know ; but there is no sign extant, that I can see, of 
any intellectual quickening being produced by them, 
on his part, in regard to the history or the prospects 
of the race. I am not going to be so dull, therefore^ 
as to promise you the very same intellectual results 
that I get from Swedenborg's books, even if you your- 
self actually have recourse to them. Indeed, multi- 



6 6 FURTHER OBSERVATIONS 

tudes of people are said to read his books and bring 
away almost no intellectual result, — multitudes who 
resort to them with great apparent complacency, and 
get, no doubt, much incidental entertainment and 
instruction from them, and yet are quite blind to 
their proper intellectual significance, to the extent, I 
am told, many of them, of seeming acutely hostile to 
it when it is brought before them. All this, of course, 
because of the more or less vacant mind they bring 
to the reading of him ; or rather, their more or less 
unsympathetic hearts. Most of them come to the 
banquet of facts and observations Swedenborg spreads 
before them with an obvious gross hankering after 
ecclesiastical righteousness, and make the most, ac- 
cordingly, of every crumb they can pick up adapted to 
gratify that unmanly and dyspeptic relish. But if 
you bring human sympathies to the banquet in ques- 
tion, I can assure you, you will find no speck of that 
base, unworthy nutriment. For it cannot be too 
much insisted on, that no books address the reader's 
intellect so much through the heart as these of Swe- 
denborg do, all in confining themselves to giving him 
spiritual information merely. 

This is no doubt an endless stumbling-block to the 
mass of readers, who regard Swedenborg as a sort of 
intellectual tailor, whose shop they have only to enter, 
to find whatsoever spiritual garments their particular 



ABOUT SWEDENBOKG. 67 

nakedness craves, all made to hand. And when they 
find, as every one among them is sure to do who has 
any faculty of spiritual discernment, that there are 
absolutely no garments made up, but only an immense 
sound of the shearing of sheep and the carding of 
wool and the whirling of wheels and the rattling of 
looms and the flying of spindles, and that every for- 
lorn wight who would be spiritually clad must actu- 
ally turn to and become his own wool-grower, weaver, 
and tailor, the great majority of course go away dis- 
gusted, and only those remain whose vocation for 
Truth is so genuine as to make any labor incurred in 
her service welcome if not pleasant. The case of 
course is far more hopeless when one goes in with 
absolutely no conscious nakedness to cover, but only 
to satisfy a vague outside curiosity about intellectual 
novelties, and make, perchance, a handsome addition 
to an already luxurious literary wardrobe. But Swe- 
denborg is not now, and probably never will be, so 
much the mode as greatly to attract this style of cus- 
tomer. 

In fact, the whole existing conception of the man 
and his aims is a mistake. He is not at all the 
intellectual craftsman or quack the world takes him 
for. He is no way remarkable as a man of original 
thought, or even as a reasoner, unless it be negatively 
so, while as a man of experience^ or a seer, his worth 



68 FURTHER OBSERVATIONS 

is of the very highest grade, as imposing no kind of 
obligation upon your belief. His judgments doubt- 
less in regard to this world's affairs were those of 
his day and generation, and strike one as grown 
very antiquated ; but there is almost no fact of spirit- 
ual observation and experience he recounts which does 
not seem of really priceless worth to my imagination, 
as illustrating and enforcing a new mind in man. If 
his books seem interesting to you also in this point of 
view, if they tend to enlighten you upon very many 
things which have puzzled you in your own mental 
pathway, or in respect to our race-origin and des- 
tiny, well and good; no doubt you too are bound 
to an ultimate profitable commerce with them. And 
in this event you will find it unquestionably true that 
their main advantage to the intellect is, that they fur- 
nish it with truths which really nourish and quicken 
it, or irresistibly compel it to function for itself, and 
independently of foreign stimulus. His books, in 
fact, amount to nothing so much as to an intellectual 
wheat-field, of no use to any one who does not enter 
in to gather and bind his own golden sheaves, and 
then proceed to thresh and grind his grain, to bolt his 
flour, to mix his bread, to build it up and bake it in 
such shapely and succulent loaves as his own intel- 
lectual bread-pan alone determines. 

But revenons a nos moutons. I have said that the 



ABOUT SWEDENBORG. 69 

main philosophic obligation we owe to Swedenborg 
lies in his clearly identifying the evil principle in 
existence with selfhood. The Christian truth some- 
what prepares ns for this ; but the church theology so 
overlays and systematically falsifies the truth, that we 
practically get little good of it. This theology, for 
example, identifies evil with a person called the Devil 
and Satan, outside the pale of human nature, but inti- 
mately conversant with its secret springs, and both 
able and disposed to use his knowledge with the ma- 
lign purpose of corrupting all its subjects. Of course 
this conception was originally due to a very immature 
scientific condition of the mind, when men had not 
the least idea of good and evil as having an exclu- 
sively spiritual or subjective source. It befits, in fact, 
a strictly mechanical or material conception of the 
soul's relation to God, and only deepens the mystery 
it attempts to explain; for if the good and evil of 
human life acknowledge no inward root, but betray 
a purely moral, voluntary, or personal genesis, it can 
only be because the creative relation to man is prima- 
rily in fault, being the power of an external, not an 
internal, life. And if God were the power primarily 
of an external life in man, and not altogether mediately 
through an internal one, neither creature nor creator 
would ever invite, as they assuredly would never 
reward, the homage of an intellectual appreciation. 



LETTER VIII 




T DEAR FRIEND:— Without doubt I 
had suffered intellectually from the same 
or similar unworthy views of the crea- 
tive relation to man, as those I adverted 
to in my last letter. I had always, from childhood, 
conceived of the Creator as bearing this outside rela- 
tion to the creature, and had attributed to the latter 
consequently the power of provoking His unmeas- 
ured hostility. Although these crude traditional 
views had been much modified by subsequent re- 
flection, I had nevertheless on the whole been in the 
habit of ascribing to the Creator, so far as my own 
life and actions were concerned, an outside discern- 
ment of the most jealous scrutiny, and had accord- 
ingly put the greatest possible alertness into His 
service and worship, until my will, as you have seen 
— thoroughly fagged out as it were with the formal, 
heartless, endless task of conciliating a stony-hearted 
Deity — actually collapsed. This was a catastrophe 



MY MORAL DEATH AND BITKIAL. 71 

far more tragic to my feeling, and far more revolu- 
tionary in its intellectual results, than the actual vio- 
lation of any mere precept of the moral law could 
be. It was the practical abrogation of the law 
itself, through the unexpected moral inertness of the 
subject. It was to my feeling not only an absolute 
decease of my moral or voluntary power, but a 
shuddering recoil from my conscious activity in that 
line. It was an actual acute loathing of the moral 
pretension itself as so much downright charlatanry. 
No idiot was ever more incompetent, practically, to 
the conduct of life than I, at that trying period, felt 
myself to be. It cost me, in fact, as much effort to 
go out for a walk, or to sleep in a strange bed, as it 
would an ordinary man to plan a campaign or write 
an epic poem. I have told you how, in looking out 
of my window at the time at a flock of silly sheep 
which happened to be grazing in the Green Park 
opposite, I used to envy them their blissful stupid 
ignorance of any law higher than their nature, their 
deep unconsciousness of self, their innocence of all 
private personality and purpose, their intense moral 
incapacity, in short, and indifference. I would freely, 
nay, gladly have bartered the world at the moment 
for one breath of the spiritual innocence which 
the benign creatures outwardly pictured, or stood 
for to my imagination - 3 and all the virtue, or moral 



72 PROFOUND MORAL ILLUSION 

righteousness, consequently, that ever illustrated our 
specific human personality, seemed simply foul and 
leprous in comparison with the deep Divine possi- 
bilities and promise of our common nature, as these 
stood symbolized to my spiritual sight in all the gen- 
tler human types of the merely animate world. There 
seemed, for instance — lustrously represented to my 
inward sense — a far more heavenly sweetness in the 
soul of a patient overdriven cab-horse, or misused 
cadger's donkey, than in all the voluminous calendar 
of Romish and Protestant hagiology, which, sooth 
to say, seemed to me, in contrast with it, nothing 
short of infernal. 

You may easily imagine, then, with what relish my 
heart opened to the doctrine I found in these most 
remarkable books, of the sheer and abject phenome- 
nality of selfhood in man ; and with what instant alac- 
rity my intellect shook its canvas free to catch every 
breeze of that virgin unexplored sea of being, to 
which this doctrine, for the first time, furnished me 
the clew. Up to this very period I had lived in 
the cheerful faith, nor ever felt the slightest shadow 
of misgiving about it — any more, I venture to say, 
than you at this moment feel a shadow of similar 
misgiving in your own mind — that my being or 
substance lay absolutely in myself, was in fact iden- 
tical with the various limitations implied in that most 



UNDER WHICH I HAD BEEN LIVING. 73 

fallacious but still unsuspected quantity. To be sure, 
I had no doubt that this being or self of mine 
(whether actually burdened, or not burdened, with 
its limitations, I did not stop to inquire, but unques- 
tionably with a capacity of any amount of burden- 
some limitation) came originally as a gift from the 
hand of God ; but I had just as little doubt that the 
moment the gift had left God's hand, or fell into my 
conscious possession, it became as essentially inde- 
pendent of Him in all spiritual or subjective regards 
as the soul of a child is of its earthly father ; how- 
ever much in material or objective regards it might 
be expedient for me still to submit to His external 
police. My moral conscience, too, lent its influence 
to the same profound illusion ; for all the precepts of 
the moral law being objectively so good and real, and 
intended in the view of an unenlightened conscience 
to make men righteous in the sight of God, I could 
never have supposed, even had I been tempted on 
independent grounds to doubt my own spiritual or 
subjective reality, that so palpably Divine a law 
contemplated, or even tolerated, a wholly infirm and 
fallacious subject ; much less that it was, in fact, 
altogether devised for the reproof, condemnation, and 
humiliation of such a subject. I had no misgiving, 
therefore, as to the manifest purpose of the Law. 
The Divine intent of it at least was as clear to me as 



74 MY BELIEF FROM IT EQUIVALENT 

it ever had been to the Jew, namely, to serve as a 
ministry of plain moral life or actual righteousness 
among men, so constructing an everlasting heaven 
out of men's warring and divided personalities : and 
not at all, as the apostles taught, a ministry of death, 
to convince those who stood approved by it of sin, 
thereby shutting up all men, good and evil alike, but 
especially the good, to unlimited dependence upon 
the sheer and mere mercy of God. 

It was impossible for me, after what I have told you, 
to hold this audacious faith in selfhood any longer. 
When I sat down to dinner on that memorable chilly 
afternoon in Windsor, I held it serene and unweak- 
ened by the faintest breath of doubt. Before I rose 
from table it had inwardly shrivelled to a cinder. 
One moment I devoutly thanked God for the inap- 
preciable boon of selfhood ; the next that inappreci- 
able boon seemed to me the one thing damnable on 
earth, seemed a literal nest of hell within my own 
entrails. Whatever difficulties then stood in the way 
of a better faith, they were infinitely milder and more 
placable than those inherent in the old one. In fact 
the old faith was itself the only obstacle in the path 
of the new. Take the one away, and the other be- 
comes inevitable. If you admit the intrinsic or essen- 
tial phenomenality of selfhood — its utter unreality 
or non-existence out of consciousness — you are logi- 



TO MY BELIEF IN THE INCARNATION. 75 

cally forced upon the truth of the creative incarna- 
tion in the created nature — or the Divine Natural 
Humanity — as the sole possible method of creation, 
as the only truth capable of explaining nature and his- 
tory. When I say forced, I take for granted that you 
have some rational interest in the subject ; I take for 
granted that you deem nature and history worthy to 
be explained, and are not a mere sensualist so intent 
upon your own pleasure as to feel no capacity for 
inward satisfactions. In that case, I repeat, the only 
existing obstacle to your belief in the necessary incar- 
nation of the Creator in the created nature in order 
to the redemption and salvation of the human race 
from the empire of evil and falsity, will be dissipated 
by your coming to acknowledge the pure phenome- 
nality of consciousness, or to disbelieve in the spiritual 
reality of selfhood. Nothing hinders one believing 
in spiritual truth but the limitary influence of falsity. 
And so, conversely, nothing hinders a man succumb- 
ing to spiritual falsity but the liberating influence 
of truth. So that the only possible way for men to 
arrive at the spiritual or living knowledge of truth, is 
by unliving their natural prejudices and prejudices 
of education. Now the deepest and most universal 
of these prejudices is that which makes selfhood the 
greatest of realities, and consequently inflates the 
heart of man with all manner of spiritual pride, 



76 THE MORAL LAW ESSENTIALLY 

avarice, and cruelty. And it is accordingly the con- 
quest of this fundamental prejudice which best pro- 
motes our spiritual rectitude, or living conjunction 
with God. 

We are now at the very focus of our difference, 
and let me utter no word that shall not be clearly 
understood. Nothing can be farther from my desire 
than to weaken the authority of the moral law, con- 
sidered as the literal aspect of all true spiritual fel- 
lowship between man and man. When the spirit of 
fellowship or equality between men is absent, then it 
behooves them, as they love their manhood and prize 
its salvation, to make much in their intercourse with 
one another of a strict conformity to the letter of the 
law. The spirit of human fellowship or equality is 
mutual love, and mutual love prompts only the most 
accordant action between all its subjects. But where 
mutual love does not as yet exist among men, but self- 
love only and love of the world, and positively accord- 
ant or harmonious action is therefore not to be expected 
from them, it becomes all-important to provide some 
natural symbol of these spontaneous manners — some 
purely negative and formal reminder of these ethics 
of the skies — whereby a faint perfume of the heavenly 
life may be kept up among men, and men thereby be 
prepared, in their turn, to recognize the Divine sub- 
stance itself when it is finally ready to come. 



TYPICAL AND PROPHETIC. 77 

Now this precise propaedeutic function is exqui- 
sitely served by the letter of the law. For the sub- 
ject of this letter — out of sincere outward or formal 
reverence for the Divine name — is taught by it 
freely to abstain from false witness, theft, adultery, 
murder, and covetousness, since a reverential absti- 
nence from these evils is the only practicable moral 
equivalent or ultimate of the highest spirit ual good- 
ness. To refrain when tempted from doing evil be- 
cause evil is contrary to the will of God, is the only 
outward rule of human conduct at all commensurate 
with inward love to God ; since it is the only rule 
which provides a formal basis for that spiritual hu- 
mility in man, which is the sole Divine end of the 
law for righteousness. Abstinence from evil, then, 
is a necessary condition of the spiritual or inward 
life in man ; but it profits a man only in so far as 
it is reverential, or prompted by a formal and para- 
mount regard for the Divine will. A great many 
persons fulfil the law formally or outwardly, because 
it is reputable so to do, and promotes their civic ad- 
vantage ; and no doubt our infirm civilization is very 
much indebted to these people, of an insincere re- 
ligious character, who yet do all, and even more than 
all, that the spiritual man does in the way of pro- 
moting men's outward fellowship. Many persons also, 
who are not actuated by worldly motives, unaffectedly 



78 ITS VOTARIES MAKE IT UTTERLY 



mistake the purpose of the law. They have no idea 
that its purpose is spiritual, being addressed to mak- 
ing its subjects humble, or giving them a conscience 
of death in themselves, but suppose that it was in- 
tended to confer actual life or righteousness upon 
them, by entitling all who obey it to permanent Di- 
vine honor, and all who disobey it to permanent 
Divine reproach. They have no perception that the 
law is essentially ministerial to the gospel revelation 
of the Divine love, being intended to soften the hard 
heart of its votary — to knead and supple it out- 
wardly — to inward Divine issues when they come. 
They conceive, on the contrary, that the law is its 
own end, being rather magisterial to the gospel than 
ministerial, since they regard the latter as being 
essentially substitutionary to the former, or view it in 
the light of a mere tardy Divine concession to men's 
weakness, after the former had sufficiently demon- 
strated their absolute want of strength. In short, 
their idea of the law is, not that it is purely pro- 
visional and educative, in order to prepare men for 
becoming spiritual out of natural, but that it is a Di- 
vine finality, addressed to the making men morally 
or actually righteous. And hence they value its 
formal moral letter infinitely above its inward or liv- 
ing spirit, contenting themselves with a mere actual 
abstinence from the evils it denounces, but caring 



FLAT, VAPID, AND SPIRITLESS. 79 

very little about the temper of mind from which the 
abstinence comes. 

Acquit me then, I pray you, of any desire to 
diminish the prestige of the moral law, considered as 
ministering to the only true Divine righteousness in 
man, by helping to bring about a spirit of unaffected, 
unostentatious humility in his bosom. For this is the 
whole spiritual scope of the law, the only thing that 
for a moment sanctifies it, or makes it holy, to the 
recognition of the human heart : to conjoin the wor- 
shipper with God by freeing his heart from the evil 
spirits that hinder such conjunction ; and every man 
therefore who is not a spiritual sot, or whose heart is 
not dead to all Divine inspiration, gives it in this point 
of view his unqualified homage. 

But there comes a time when the moral law no 
longer ministers to the Divine life in man ; when it 
most distinctly does not produce a spirit of humility 
in its subject, but a spirit of pride and self-inflation. 
The law is now wrenched from its commanding spir- 
itual uses, which are all summed up in making the 
individual man think small things of himself, and 
employed by men as an instrument of their own 
material aggrandizement. When the law is thus 
wrested from its only proper Divine to purely human 
uses, from its exclusively spiritual to an exclusively 
material function, it becomes no longer an instru- 



80 THE LAW A PRESENT STENCH IN THE EARTH. 

ment of mutual peace and unity among men, but of 
mutual self-seeking and warfare. Then the law from 
being confessedly Divine becomes the most undivine 
thing beneath the skies ; for then it ministers — as 
nothing else on earth has power to do — by its 
usurped Divine authority, to the inmost spirit of hell 
in man, to a spirit of pride and self-assertion and 
intolerance and lust and cruelty and revenge. It 
was originally given by God only to humble the pride 
of selfhood in man, that so the neighbor might become 
exalted in his regard. It is most undivinely used by 
man only as a cunning instrument for suppressing the 
neighbor, or subjecting him to one's boundless cupidity 
and avarice. It is no longer Divine, then, but out 
and out diabolic, confessing itself spiritually the only 
fortress of evil known to the human bosom. This is 
what secretly nauseates all good men with our legal 
righteousness, fills them with an inward loathing of 
our conventional respectability, sickens them to death 
with our technical " Church "and its flatulent senti- 
mentality, with our technical " State " and its dis- 
honest morality. This is what makes them inwardly 
hate our existing civilization as, spiritually, a thing 
of infamy, as the only thing which stands in the way 
of the Divine kingdom on earth; and they would, 
themselves, gladly beat the drum and blow the trum- 
pet for its final burial out of human sight. 



LETTER IX 




'Y DEAR FRIEND : — Don't imagine that 
my reference to the law in my last letter 
was intended merely or chiefly to illustrate 
what Paul says of the legal economy under 
which the Jew lived, namely : that it teas designed only 
to give its subject a knowledge of sin. Doubtless this 
was an argument of great weight to the Jew, for he was 
the actual subject of a Divine kingdom, and if the law 
of that kingdom in its practical scope could be shown 
to be designedly subversive of the national hope to- 
wards God, his main opposition to the gospel consid- 
ered as dishonoring the law would of course fall to the 
ground. But this argument has no similar pertinence 
to us, who have never been subjects of a literal Divine 
regimen, and whose law consequently has always 
claimed a more or less strictly spiritual administration. 
To be sure, we have certain portentous Jewish phan- 
toms of our own to contend with — certain very 
orthodox Christian enemies of the Divine Spirit 



m 



82 DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THE EEAL JEW 

the persons of our Popish and Protestant ritualists, 
or high churchmen. But no one is in any danger 
of mistaking these worthless pretenders for authentic 
Divine persons, nor of gravely combating their eccle- 
siastical fopperies and gross covert disloyalty to the 
human ideal. They are not natural Jews, but only 
spiritual or spurious ones : only simulated or imi- 
tative ones. They are not the pure gold of the 
sanctuary, once famous but now vanished from earth 
forever : they are a mere counterfeit and pinchbeck 
image of it, with a view to impose upon simple and 
credulous imaginations. Their ecclesiastical preten- 
sion is in itself an inversion of the most fundamental 
principle of spiritual order, which is, that the natural 
in every case descend from the spiritual : while they, 
on the contrary, are the direct spiritual progeny of a 
very ugly and sordid natural parentage. Thus, they 
are by no means actually living under a specific Divine 
regimen, but only "making believe" that they are. 
They have not so much even as a quasi Divine obli- 
gation on their consciences to do what they do ; they 
only act as if they had. This, you perceive, makes 
all the difference in the world between the honest 
natural Jew and our own dishonest spiritual ones, 
and shows moreover the admirable reason why Christ 
called these latter, in the persons of their representa- 
tive types at his day, " hypocrites," that is, actors, 



AND THE CHRISTIAN IMITATION. 83 

unconsciously playing a part to which they are noway 
Divinely summoned. We may then safely leave all 
our spectacular prodigies in this line to Christ's con- 
cise characterization of them, assured that nothing 
of harm can ensue to any serious interest of the world 
from so strictly histrionic an activity. 

But the apostles had to deal with a much less 
effeminate and contemptible class of zealots, whose 
superstitious regard for their own law threatened, 
indeed, to stop the world's progress, so hearty and 
malignant was their opposition to that gospel which 
the apostles proclaimed, and whose sole burden was 
that Jesus of Nazareth was the Christ. They esteemed 
their own law a living Divine one already as to the 
minutest jot or tittle of its letter, and this purported 
to bless them exclusively as children of Abraham. 
How could they conceive, then, that the law had, 
as the apostles taught, a far more living, or inward 
and Divine spirit, purporting to bless them only as 
they renounced their Jewish selves, and identified 
their interests with those of the Gentile world? In 
fact, this tiresome and frivolous letter of their law 
inspired them with so frenzied and fanatical a regard 
as having a purely Jewish end, that it at last left 
them in all intellectual respects hopelessly blind and 
imbecile. It was a timely office in Paul, therefore, to 
remind his unenlightened countrymen of the deadly 



84 WE LIVE NOT UNDER A LITERAL BUT 

animus of their law towards every one who boasted 
of its literal friendship. Even natural death, he ar- 
gued, would be harmless if it were not for the law. 
" The sting of death is doubtless sin : but then it is 
only the law that gives us a conscience of sin. The 
sole strength of sin is the law ; and every subject of 
the law, therefore, who sees its intention to be to 
give men a knowledge of sin and not of righteousness, 
will bless God that it was never a final dispensation, 
but at best a preparatory one for the gospel we now 
proclaim. The law may be best viewed, in fact, 
under the similitude of a respectable pedagogue, in 
charge of a school of turbulent urchins, whom if he 
can make even tolerably sensible of their own vast 
deficiencies in point of culture, he will deem his duty 
done towards them, and contentedly leave them to the 
chances of their future manhood. " 

This, I repeat, was a very important truth to those 
to whom it was addressed, a typical " outside " people, 
subjects of an external Divine law, who were di- 
rected to an external Divine Saviour as the veritable 
end of their law for righteousness. In short, the Jew 
was notoriously a frivolous subject — as near to worth- 
less as a people could well be that still wore the 
human form — and cultivating only such base ideas 
of the Divine righteousness as stood in a mere " out- 
side cleansing of the cup and platter, while inwardly 



A SPIRITUAL DIVINE ADMINISTRATION. 85 

they were full of extortion and excess." But it ought, 
I repeat, to be particularly and frankly noted that 
this apostolic reasoning has no special relevancy to us 
at this day, who have always lived not under a literal 
but an exclusively spiritual Divine dispensation. Our 
forefathers, in the revolution they accomplished, sim- 
ply designed to free themselves and their descendants 
from political vassalage to England. But in the form 
they subsequently impressed upon their work they 
builded greatly better than they designed, or even 
than they themselves suspected. For in disowning, 
as they resolutely did, an authoritative Church and a 
'consecrated State, they managed quite unconsciously 
to swing clear, not only of political and ecclesiastical 
England, but of literal Christendom as well : which 
derives its form or quality from those two disowned in- 
stitutions exclusively. The result is that we, their 
descendants, are denizens henceforth of spiritual 
Christendom only. For so far as we confess ourselves 
their legitimate children, logically approving of and 
identified with their acts, we frankly acknowledge 
ourselves with respect to the rest of the world a new 
or spiritual people, sifted from the nations as wheat is 
sifted from chaff; amenable only to a living or inward 
and imprescriptible Divine Law in our own bosoms 
— that of our growing humanitary affections and 
thoughts ; perfectly atheistic therefore, if need be, in 



86 GROWING INDIFFERENCE OF MEN 

so far as our faith is due to any merely instituted Deity, 
that is, any Deity outside of our own nature; per- 
fectly irresponsible and immoral, if need be, so far as 
our obedience is due to any merely putative, or arbi- 
trary and established, Divine order : that is to say, 
any order not strictly conformed to the recognized 
principles of human nature. 

If you will pardon me a slight digression here, T 
would like to observe that what I have just said ex- 
plains the reason why the spiritual world — the world 
of heaven and hell — has undergone such dire eclipse, 
or fallen so completely under the shadow of the 
natural world, that men no longer scruple to claim 
a direct commerce with God, even in the flesh, and 
therefore not only reject all so-called " spiritual " au- 
thority as obsolete or impertinent, but are fast grow- 
ing indifferent even to their once highly prized civic 
righteousness.* It is impossible to watch the fatal 
demoralization which of late years has been creeping 

* This of course outside the technical church. The state of things 
within the church is strictly and strikingly parallel to that witnessed 
at its founder's first or carnal coming. That is to say, the Jew vindi- 
cated his legal or formal orthodoxy at whatever cost of shame and suf- 
fering to the person of him who alone constituted its prophetic scope or 
substance. And the professing Christian church avouches its fidelity to 
the person of Christ, by reviling, evil-entreating, and persecuting every 
interest, Divine and human, which makes his person spiritually vener- 
able or memorable. 



TO THEIR CIVIC REPUTE. 87 

over men in positions of public and private trust, and 
still believe that citizenship is estimated as it once 
was, or that men in general still retain their respect 
for any merely instituted sanctity or decency under 
heaven. Freedom, and no longer force, has become 
the acknowledged ethics of the Divine administration, 
to the consequent enfeebling of the obligations of 
outward law ; and this enlarged consciousness on our 
part brings with it a new and wholly spiritual con- 
ception of creative power. It enforces in us such a 
growing sense of harmony between the Divine and 
human natures, as must erelong thoroughly foreclose 
the old controversy of flesh and spirit — the church 
and the world — and reduce ritual religion itself to 
a mere code of good manners. 

I have no desire and no right to confirm what I 
say by reference to my own personal history; but 
I cannot help confessing, by way of illustration, that 
I myself have found few things for the last thirty or 
forty years more fatiguing to my regenerate inward 
sense — less accommodated to my growing conviction 
of God's natural humanity — than our current eccle- 
siastical culture. Nothing could be pleasanter than 
"going to church" upon certain holidays — every 
holiday in fact — and losing oneself in the great con- 
gregation, if the worship were only sincere and inno- 
cent. But no worship can be sincere or innocent 



88 OUR CURRENT ECCLESIASTICAL CULTURE 

which is not first of all disinterested or spontaneous. 
If any gain however small is hoped to be realized from 
observing it, if any loss however small is feared to be 
incurred from neglecting it, the worship confesses 
itself mercenary; and surely nothing can be more 
remote from spiritual innocence than a mercenary 
habit of mind in Divine things. All living or accep- 
table worship is free, unforced, spontaneous, as ex- 
pressing a heart and mind unaffectedly reconciled to 
God; and who shall pretend to be at peace with 
God that has yet anything to ask or expect at the 
Divine hands? 

Nothing, it appears to me, can be more utterly 
worthless and even degrading, in a spiritual estima- 
tion, both to oneself and to society, than a life passed 
in ritual devotion, or the exercises of formal piety. 
It is an insult to God and man to dignify so sodden 
a routine with the sacred name of life ; call it rather 
death and damnation to every soul of man that finds 
it life. I wonder above all how any one who rever- 
ences even the letter alone of the New Testament, 
and remembers the terrible warnings and objurga- 
tions it denounces upon a mere conventional or legal 
hope towards God, can dare to associate his spiritual 
fortunes with our modern ecclesiastical Judaism. 
The visible Church seems to me in a spiritual or 
philosophic point of view to be " the abomination 






FRIVOLOUS AND UNMANLY. 89 

of desolation"; a refuge and embodiment of the 
frankest spiritual egotism and the rankest spiritual 
cupidity. Its pharisaic airs and temper provoke one 
to alternate smiles and tears : smiles, to see such 
transparent spiritual pride simulating the aspect and 
language of humility; tears, to see so many well- 
to-do worldly-wise people inwardly hardening them- 
selves against the access and solicitation of God's 
tenderest and most timely pity in our nature. 

How blasphemous, then, to talk of God's life at 
this time of day in any such self-righteous precinct ! 
How inevitable, one might say, its encounter almost 
everywhere else, especially where there is no pretension 
to anything but a secular temper. I can hardly flatter 
myself that the frankly chaotic or #-cosmical aspect 
of our ordinary street-car has altogether escaped your 
enlightened notice in your visits to the city ; and it 
will perhaps surprise you, therefore, to learn that I 
nevertheless continually witness so much mutual for- 
bearance on the part of its habitues ; so much spotless 
acquiescence under the rudest personal jostling and 
inconvenience; such a cheerful renunciation of one's 
strict right ; such an amused deference, oftentimes, to 
one's invasive neighbor : in short, and as a general 
thing, such a heavenly self-shrinkage in order that 
"the neighbor," handsome or unhandsome, whole- 
some or unwholesome, may sit or stand at ease : that 



90 THE HORSE-CAR OUR TRUE 

I not seldom find myself inwardly exclaiming with 
the patriarch : How dreadful is this place ! It is none 
other than the house of God, and the gate of heaven. 
Undeniably on its material or sensuous side the 
vehicle has no claim to designation as a Bethel ; but 
at such times on its spiritual or supersensuous side 
it seems to my devout sense far more alert with the 
holy Ghost, far more radiant and palpitating with 
the infinite comity and loveliness, than any the most 
gorgeous and brutal ecclesiastical fane that ever 
gloomed and stained the light of heaven. 

But I only allege this familiar experience as a 
sample of the way in which, to our quickened or 
regenerate perception, persons and places and things 
that have been hitherto conventionally most sacred, 
are ready and eager to confess themselves profane, 
to confess themselves in fact sheer spiritual rubbish ; 
while things and persons and places hitherto reputed 
especially forlorn and commonplace are becoming 
spiritually hallowed, becoming inwardly vivid and 
picturesque with God's revealed modesty, truth, and 
mercy. 

And now that this digression is ended, let me 
return to my subject, and say that my purpose in 
referring to Paul's famous contention about the 
spiritual import of the law is quite different from 
his, though doubtless it lies in the same philosophic 



SHECHINAH AT THIS DAY. 



91 



direction. Paul was content to show that the law 
being spiritual, could not but be fatal to the claim 
of a moral or actual righteousness among men : that 
it condemned those only of its subjects who stood 
literally justified by it, and justified those only who 
confessed themselves literally condemned by it : be- 
cause the former, in arrogating merit to themselves 
and ascribing blame to others, violated the spirit of 
the law, which was charity, or neighborly love ; and 
because the latter gave evidence of that humility of 
spirit which is the only and inseparable basis of charity, 
or neighborly love. 

But this does not content me. I admire the apos- 
tle's profound critical insight, it is true, and applaud 
the lesson conveyed by it with all my heart ; but I 
cannot help going on to say that if such be the one 
unflinching spirit of all Divine law upon earth, namely, 
to reveal the evil which is latent in all men by nature, 
and so lay an eternal basis for a spirit of charity or 
good neighborhood in the human breast, why then 
it becomes at once grandly evident that the estimate 
formed by God of every man of woman born — the 
morally good no less than the morally evil man — dif- 
fers infinitely, or in kind, from the estimate formed by 
man himself. 

It is evident, for example, that whereas the latter, 
for lack of spiritual apprehension of the Divine law, 



92 



CHRIST'S PRECISE WORK ON EARTH. 



regards the moral differences of men as final or abso- 
lute, the former regards all men — the morally good 
and the morally evil man both alike — as blent in 
one and the same community of evil so long as they 
are disaffected to the spirit of the law, which is one 
of charity, or mutual love. 

But much more than this is evident. For it is evi- 
dent that while man attributes to himself alone the 
source and the consequent responsibility of his evil 
moral acts, the Divine mind stigmatizes this senti- 
ment as false, or sets the individual evil doer free by 
charging his shortcomings to the common stock of 
human nature. 

But even this is a very small part of what is evident. 
For if the Divine wisdom imputes no guilt to the 
individual man, but charges all the evil done by men 
to the account of their common nature, why then it 
is evident that inasmuch as no man can feel himself 
responsible for his natural but only for his personal 
limitations, so he is bound to look to God alone for 
the final reconstitution of human nature in harmony 
with His own infinite goodness. 

Now this Divine resuscitation of our nature, 

Or COMPLETE UNITION OF IT WITH THE INEFFABLE 

divine perfection, is precisely the work which Swe- 
denborg ascribes to Jesus Christ. 



^§i!8^ 






WssA 


<:^Sj^^^03^\ ~>J* ^M^l 





LETTER X. 




T DEAR FRIEND:-^- When I began 
writing these letters I imagined myself 
able to say all I wanted to say within the 
compass of ten short letters, at most : and 
this after making a generous allowance to the weakness 
of my nerves. But the allowance apparently was not 
generous enough, and the consequence is that I find 
myself, at the opening of my tenth letter, only fairly 
abreast of the great truth of the Incarnation, to which 
nevertheless everything else I have said was meant 
to be strictly subordinate. My nerves, in fact, are 
like a spirited horse, out of whom you may coax a 
good deal of service if you use patient and persuasive 
methods, but who violently resents and resists the 
coercion of whip and spur. What then remains to 
be done? Shall I, like a vicious horse, leave my 
work unfinished ? Or shall I go on to bring it still 
to such orderly close as my infirmities will permit ? 
I choose the latter course, although the bulk of my 



94 SWEDENBORG'S INTERPRETATION 

scribble be unduly augmented thereby, simply because 
I hate to leave entirely unreported certain explicanda 
in relation to the great truth of the Incarnation, which 
may be of use in softening if not altogether obviating 
your prejudices against it. I know that these preju- 
dices are due mainly to the very dense ignorance we 
all of us cherish with respect to spiritual life and 
order. And if I may only say some word which shall 
induce you to have recourse to Swedenborg's books, 
where the amplest information of the sort needed is 
supplied, and where all one's intellectual unrest and 
perturbation of every kind find themselves tenderly 
soothed and placated, I shall be happy. 

I had best, perhaps, state first of all what the 
apotheosis of our nature in the person of Jesus 
Christ, as reported in Swedenborg's pages, practi- 
cally amounts to ; and then make such comments 
upon it in detail as may be needful to commend the 
truth to your awakened attention. 

The truth, then, as I find it in Swedenborg, prac- 
tically amounts to this, namely : an alleged redemption 
of human nature — from what ? — from the spiritual 
limitations and disabilities imposed upon it by heaven 
and hell ; and the consequent unlimited purification 
of that nature into harmony with the Divine perfec- 
tion. 

Mind well what I say here. I say that the redemp- 



OF THE GOSPEL. 95 



tion of human nature means its redemption from 
certain evils which are by no means incident to it in 
virtue of its own quality, but are imposed upon it 
through the influence of the spiritual world — mean- 
ing thereby the realm of heaven and hell — upon 
the individual subjects of the nature. 

But here you will ask me : " What is the necessity 
for what you call the spiritual world, or the divided 
realm of heaven and hell, in the scheme of creation ? " 
To which I might as briefly answer : " The spiritual 
world, or its division into heaven and hell, is a neces- 
sary incident of the cleansing of human nature from 
evil, and its consequent complete impletion or unition 
with the Divine perfection.' ' 

But here again a new question confronts me : 
Whence then this liability to evil in human nature ? 
What, in other words, is the origin of spiritual evil in 
men, or the evil which attaches to them by nature ? 
For one rightly reasons that if the spiritual world by 
unduly influencing individual minds on earth ends 
by vitiating or corrupting human nature itself, it is 
important to know how so malign an influence ever 
becomes exerted by the spiritual world. We can 
perfectly understand how physical evil, or the evil 
which man suffers, originates : namely, in a want of 
harmony between himself and his own body. One 
knows too very well how moral evil, or the evil which 



96 THE ORIGIN OF 

man does, comes about : namely, from a want of free 
harmonic adjustment in the relations of man to man. 
But here is an evil incomparably deeper than both of 
these, because it is, in fact, their very and exclusive 
root : not the paltry and passing evil under which 
man is passive, as pain ; nor yet the still more super- 
ficial and remediable evil in which he is active, as 
vice and crime : but spiritual evil, or the evil which 
he is, an evil which characterizes him in relation to 
his own vital consciousness, and if not removed there- 
fore must utterly palsy his consciousness considered 
as a means of development to his nature. 

This gigantic and hopeless evil in man, then, springs 
from no defect of his physical nor of his moral make, 
but wholly from the limitation and infirmity of his 
finite or personal consciousness, which is a most 
rigid SELF-consciousness, excluding any other than a 
subjective basis ; whereas it has manifestly no warrant 
in the creative infinitude, which is the infinitude of 
Love, to have any but an objective basis, that is, to 
be anything but a social consciousness, embracing the 
neighbor along with the self, or involving a public and 
private element quite equally. But you will ask why 
the creature of God is thus shut up in his beginnings 
to a conscious or phenomenal existence in himself, 
instead of being endowed outright with his creator's 
vital substance or being? It is that God, by the 



SPIRITUAL EVIL. 97 



necessity of his perfection, cannot permit any other 
than a phenomenal or conscious existence to his crea- 
ture, so long as the latter remains wholly inexpert, 
or untried and undisciplined, in the utter spiritual 
death or nothingness which he bears about in him- 
self as finitely constituted, and which whilst the inex- 
perience lasts makes it impossible to commit the 
Divine substance or being to him. The creator 
himself is of course the only real or natural life of 
the creature — as is implied in the very terms of the 
proposition : but how is the creature ever livingly 
to learn this great truth? His creator is not the 
least a denizen of space and time; is not the least 
a visible or outward existence, so that his senses will 
afford him at best but a reflected or lifeless knowl- 
edge of Him. Evidently then the creature demands 
some other avenue to Divine knowledge than sense — 
some inward avenue, since the creator is not to be 
found outside of him — and this inward avenue is 
supplied by consciousness, or se^-knowledge. In 
proportion as I come truly to know myself in all 
the compass of my physical, moral, and spiritual dis- 
ability, do I come to a living or hearty apprehension 
of God's infinitude. And in no other way. All the 
bibles, all the churches, all the sacraments, all the 
rites and ceremonies, all the priesthoods in the land, 
are totally impotent to confer upon me one fibre of 



98 CREATION INEVITABLY CONTRACTS 

this living knowledge of God which is given by my 
life or consciousness alone; however much I doubt 
not they may instruct my intellect in things pertaining 
and subsidiary to such knowledge. Thus until the 
creature's own life or consciousness be so tried, dis- 
ciplined, or purified as readily to yield him this living 
lore : until he be inwardly or SELF-taught, in other 
words, to discern the ineffable holiness which under- 
lies and transfigures his own boundless cupidity and 
cruelty : he will necessarily refuse to receive or repro- 
duce that only real or unconscious life which is God, 
and must accordingly be content for a time to put up 
with the unreal or seeming and fallacious life of self- 
hood. This beggarly life will doubtless seem to the 
creature, while he is still unconscious of any inner or 
higher and better life, most real and stupendous; and 
it will indeed in the miraculous providence of God, 
and through all his blindness however fatuous, serve 
as an admirable basis of experience to him, slowly 
but surely promoting the final evolution of his real or 
natural life ; but in itself, or absolutely, the personal 
or conscious life — this life of selfhood — is not merely 
worthless, but ruinous, and Schopenhauer and the 
rest of our purblind modern Buddhists, from their 
unchristian point of view, do every way well to exe- 
crate it. 

And now, having answered your doubt, I return to 



SOIL Otf ITS SUBJECTIVE SIDE. 99 

my subject. The ineradicable imperfection of created 
existence, as such, or the origin of spiritual evil in the 
creature, consists, as we have seen, in his attributing 
to himself a rigidly personal or finite consciousness, 
and so perverting the creative energy and influx in 
him to purely selfish or unsocial issues. The creature 
is of course perfectly unaware of this evil, and is as 
innocent of any intention to bring it about as the 
child unborn. He is himself as yet the spiritually 
unborn child of God — a mere embryo of still unde- 
veloped Divine possibilities in his nature — and one 
does n't expect to find any divinely normal or natural 
results in himself or his surroundings. It seems 
indeed inevitable to any Divine creation — and this 
simply because it is Divine or infinite — that it should 
always exhibit soil or taint upon its subjective side, 
or present spiritually the strongest possible antago- 
nism to its creator. At least I myself do not see how* 
otherwise, the creative perfection or infinitude as the 
bringer of good out of evil, is ever going to be vindi- 
cated by it. The creature as we have seen can never 
come to the conception of the creative infinitude 
through the senses, because the senses themselves are 
a grossly limitary power, or witness exclusively to the 
finite. He must come to it then only from within, 
or livingly, that is to say : as that infinitude makes 
itself manifest to him through consciousness or the 



100 CREATION AS A SPIRITUAL WORK 

development of his own nature. If the divine infini- 
tude be, as it undeniably is, a purely inward one — 
if it attach to the creative name or character, and not 
to His works, thus to what He is in himself, or essen- 
tially, and not to what He is in his creature, or exis- 
tentially — then the sole worthy judgment we can 
form of it must necessarily reflect in the first place 
our experience of our finite selves, or express above 
all things our essential difference in kind from the 
Creator. It must be a judgment in fact confessing 
all creatureship to be a state of otherness or aliena- 
tion to the Creator, and as such otherness or alienation 
finite or imperfect. In other words — for I confess 
the living sentiment is not easily put into adequate 
form — our only spiritual or living acknowledgment 
of the creative infinitude, is an internal or worshipful 
acknowledgment, implying our own inward self-efface- 
ment, our own free or spontaneous death to ourselves. 
Thus it is a homage of the heart which the Creator 
covets in the first instance from the creature, and only 
by remote derivation thence of the intellect : and this 
not with any absurd view of course to aggrandize 
Himself by the puny homage of the creature, but 
only with a view to its softening the latter's sense of 
otherness or alienation to Himself, so rendering him 
accessible to all those Divine traits of tenderness, 
gentleness, and pity infinite, whereby he is destined 



OF GOD IS PLAINLY MIKACUL0US, 101 

one day to live : for heart-homage, as we know from 
our own secular experience even, is full of profound 
humility on the subject's part, being convertible in- 
deed in every case into a confession of sin ; and you 
know with what reluctance the intellect reverberates 
any such confession. 

Almost obviously then we may say — may we not, 
my dear friend ? — that all spiritual or subjective 
creation, as expressing the infinite love, or inmost 
heart, of the Creator, is ex vi terminorum or by virtue 
of such infinitude, miraculous. For it is no out- 
ward or material result that is aimed at by such a 
process, but a purely inward or conscious one, and it 
involves therefore spiritually the humiliation of crea- 
tive substance to created form, and suspends its own 
actual achievement upon the Creator showing him- 
self able by means of such spiritual humiliation to 
lead captivity captive, or rise triumphant over death 
and hell, by exalting the created nature into com- 
plete unison with his perfection. At all events, we 
may say with entire certainty, that the creative en- 
ergy in the actual creation — and simply because it 
is creative, having therefore no other vent for itself, 
or field of manifestation, than its creature's conscious- 
ness — is not only fairly shut up to that finite abode 
such as it is, or whatever be its intrinsic limitations, 
but freely engages itself precisely there to avouch 



102 AND THEREFORE ADMITS NO WITNESS 

and make intelligible its own majestic infinitude, by 
permanently rescuing the created nature from the 
keeping of the created subject, and enlarging or glo- 
rifying it into Divine proportions. 

— I have a vague sense of having said very nearly 
what I wanted to say in this letter, and yet on re- 
flection I am not sure about it. I feel such a mental 
impotence in regard to the ineffable theme, such a 
sense of silent and amazed and abashed truth in rela- 
tion to it, that, say what I may, I can hardly feel sure 
of having said anything to the purpose. This comes, 
I suppose, from the creative truth appealing for recep- 
tion so exclusively to the heart in the first place, and 
disposing one rather to mute adoring wonder than to 
voluble appreciation. I confess for my part that this 
truth of the spiritual creation, or of God's natural 
humanity, is in itself so grand and unexpected as 
utterly to beggar my imagination at the start, and 
make me more abjectly thankful for positive knowl- 
edge about it, such as I find in Swedenborg's books, 
than I have ever been for my daily bread. And pre- 
cisely the most fundamental point of that knowledge 
is what I have been trying to make plain to you, 
namely: that creation is a subjective or living and 
spiritual achievment of Divine love and wisdom with- 
in the strictest precincts of human nature, and that 
it accordingly neither appeals to nor admits any other 



BUT THAT OF LIFE OR CONSCIOUSNESS. 103 

attestation in us than that of consciousness, which is 
the strict or true organ of our nature. 

You, unless I greatly err, have not been in the 
habit of viewing creation in this light nor of assign- 
ing to consciousness so distinctive and important a 
role in the evolution of our nature. You have been 
wont, that is, to regard creation in its mere legendary 
aspect, as primarily a material and objective work of 
God, wrought within the proper precincts of space 
and time, and only secondarily or reflectively spiritual 
and subjective, as effected within the sphere of men's 
affection and thought. And you have been wont con- 
sequently to regard consciousness not as the organ of 
men's proper nature, attesting only what is unitary 
and universal in their experience, but rather as a mere 
authentication and badge of their private personality, 
attesting what is but individual or trivial and differ- 
ential in their annals. 

But these distinctions are obviously too large a 
theme to be approached at the close of a letter ; and 
we shall do them more justice after getting a little 
more insight into the philosophy of creation gen- 
erally, and particularly into the doctrine of nature as 
rigidly incidental thereto, as in fact its inevitable 
point d'appui. 



LETTER XI. 







T DEAR FRIEND: — It is sometimes 
[j. hotly contended among professing Chris- 
tians whether there be few or many 
saved. The gospel itself sheds no light 
upon the dreary problem either way, and what it 
does say renders this and every similar idle question 
from a human point of view altogether superfluous 
and tiresome. Eor it testifies that a certain man 
called Jesus the Christ, who was conceived and born 
of a virgin mother (and was therefore presumably 
free from limitation on the psychical or paternal 
side) was eventually able by the things which he 
suffered and did, to unite his human nature to the 
Godhead, and invest that hitherto undefined and 
unknown force with the perfectly clear lineaments of 
a glorified flesh-and-blood man. In face of this testi- 
mony all our breathless theologic and scientific dis- 
putes sink into the insignificant prattle of childhood, 
and one wholly forgets to consider whether in fact 



OBJECTION TO MIRACLE. 105 

the number of saved be absolutely few or many. 
For if a man be sure that his nature is enlarged to 
the compass of infinitude, it can signify very little 
to him what afterwards becomes of his very uninter- 
esting person. To be sure one cannot very well 
doubt that in that case his person will fare much 
beyond its proper deserts : for if the nature of man 
become divinized it is hard to see how his person, 
which is a strict phenomenon of his nature, can 
escape reflecting a proportionate enlargement : but all 
I want to say is that provided the gospel be true, 
a man can perfectly well afford to dismiss all anxiety 
upon the score of his private or personal fortunes at 
God's hands. 

" Aye," you reply, "provided the gospel is true ! 
But I have serious doubts of this. That is to say, 
I have lately taken counsel of certain distinguished 
scientific teachers, and they have so discredited mira- 
cle to me as a factor in human affairs, that I even 
hesitate to admit any truth however little ' scientific,' 
which like that of the gospel seems necessarily to 
involve it." 

Miracle no doubt is very properly disowned by 
science as a true cause of phenomena, because if men 
attempt to account for physical facts by the allegation 
of metaphysical causes, or causes extrinsic to the physi- 
cal realm, they must end by denying physics an order 



106 MIKACLE IS BAD SCIENCE, 

of their own, and so disqualify science. But because 
miracle is disowned by science as an answer to her 
physical interrogations, we are not justified, nor ever 
shall be, in excluding it from philosophic recognition, 
as in truth the most efficient factor in the history of 
human nature. For philosophy unlike science has no 
interest in physics as a literal fact, but only as a spirit- 
ual symbol, and is no way disconcerted therefore when 
you deny miracle a place and function in physical 
order. She has never been disposed to assign it such 
place and function, but on the contrary has expressly 
relegated it to spiritual or metaphysical uses. No 
man of philosophic genius, that is, no lover of truth 
for truth's own sake, has ever dreamt of finding a 
place or function for miracle in reference to physics, 
or the fixed statics of the mind, and has allowed it at 
most in reference to history, or its living dynamics 
and outcome. Every such man unfeignedly reverences 
miracle under this reserve, because in the long spir- 
itual night of the mind when all knowledge of Divine 
things was obscured under the pall of men's mental 
and material penury, it alone shone as a feeble but 
prophetic day-star from on high to lift men's faith 
and hope out of an every way lifeless and ignominious 
present, and fix them on a living and radiant future 
big with God's unimaginable mercy. Thus miracle 
has always spoken to the free or spontaneous mind of 






BUT VERY GOOD PHILOSOPHY. 107 

man, which recognizes in itself a higher life than that 
of organic nature, and has always nurtured it to im- 
mortal issues. It has alone in fact kept this mind 
alive in men, when science, or their servile intelli- 
gence, being as absolutely tethered to physics as 
an imprisoned bird to its cage, would otherwise 
have willingly immersed it in the mere mud of 
sense. 

It ought to be confessed moreover that science 
has never taken cognizance but of strictly objective 
facts, facts of man's physical or outside experience, 
facts, every one of them, susceptible in a more or 
less subtle fashion of a sensible verification. So 
that it is only by breaking her own tether, the 
tether that binds her to existence, and leaping the 
petty fences that shut her out from the free domain 
of the human mind, that science comes to know any- 
thing more about facts of life or consciousness, facts 
of man's interior or subjective experience, than a 
blind mole knows of astronomy. Yet these are the 
express data of philosophy, or things given in her 
very existence, without which accordingly she has no 
foothold upon earth. For philosophy has but one 
end, the research of being, and confines herself con- 
sequently to the only field where she finds any 
echo or revelation of such being, namely: the field 
of man's phenomenal life or consciousness. Life or 



108 MIRACLE IS BAD SCIENCE, 

consciousness unites what sense or science divides, 
and it is this unitary point of knowledge in man that 
philosophy takes for granted in all her appeals, while 
she bestows a very fitful and subordinate glance at 
the lifeless or divided testimony of sense or science. 

Now science is self-excluded — excluded, that is, 
by the necessity of self-preservation — from the re- 
search of being, i. e., what gives spiritual or invisible 
unity to things, and devotes herself instead to ascer- 
taining the constitution of existence, that is, to the 
discovery of the strictly material bond or tenure of 
existence which this magnificent framework of na- 
ture exhibits. In spite however of these purist or 
pedantic airs of science the craving of man after 
higher knowledge has been so inveterate as to force 
science herself upon the effort to supply it, by for- 
mulating a strictly ontological theory of existence, 
making sense final and absolute, so at all events 
barring out the conception of a spiritual creation, 
with all the ghostly interests and imaginations inci- 
dent thereto. This is a clever dodge, for although 
it is no more warranted by science than by philos- 
ophy, it still enables the scientific man by winking 
hard to exclude from his mental horizon a vast array 
of intrusive questions of exceeding interest to the 
average mind, which yet bring nothing but per- 
plexity and dismay to a wilfully narrower intelli- 



BUT VERY GOOD PHILOSOPHY. 109 

gence. No one of a philosophic turn of mind, I 
am persuaded, grudges science any temporary relief 
it secures to itself in this crafty way; but when 
scientific men, not content with this good-humored 
concession, attempt disingenuously to foist in upon 
other minds those purely negative and authoritative 
conclusions of theirs, they should be made clearly to 
understand that they are guilty of a very impudent 
interference with human freedom. An ontologic or 
absolute scheme of universal existence may be freely 
tolerated to them personally, as summarily saving 
them much precious time which they would devote 
to minor pursuits. But it is nothing short of lu- 
dicrous to suppose that the great unsophisticated 
spiritual instincts of mankind are ever going to 
acquiesce in any such piddling scheme of things, 
did it even claim to its support all and sundry the 
cumbrous personnel of science fifty times multiplied. 
Tor my own part I laugh to utter scorn this sottish 
and grovelling notion of an ontologic basis to exist- 
ence, and hold the dicta of any of our more flagrant 
scientific popes thereupon to be quite as contempt- 
ible rationally, and not near so honest morally, as 
those of their deposed and degraded ecclesiastical 
rivals. The first duty of a scientific teacher is to 
bring definite conceptions before the mind; and 
what has a spurious theology to offer more stupid 



HO MIRACLE IS BAD SCIENCE, 

and depraved intellectuably than this ontologic expli- 
cation of creation, wherein existence frankly confesses 
to constituting her own absolute being, and the cart 
meekly acknowledges its long misunderstood duty of 
drawing the horse. 



r Now in the name of all the gods at once, 
Upon -what meat doth this our 'science' feed, 
That she is grown so great" 






as to convert the abject limitations of her own ser- 
vile intelligence into a law of the human mind, or 
sink heaven-born wisdom itself into a mere synonym 
of learning? It seems in fact to be a modern 
instance of iEsop's fabulous old fox, who was so 
annoyed by an accident to his hinder dimensions 
which compelled him always to maintain a sitting 
posture, that he found thenceforth no solace in life 
but in persuading his brethren to undergo a like 
physical mutilation. 

It strikes me then that the cavil you urge against 
the Christian truth, as involving a miraculous basis, 
is simply captious, or disowns even a scientific war- 
rant, let alone a philosophic one. For the only ob- 
jection which science (short of self-stultification) can 
offer to miracle is, when it is postulated as a physical 
cause. And the miracle in question, which is the 
birth of Christ from a virgin, so far from being 
adduced to characterize any fact whatever of physical 



BUT VERY GOOD PHILOSOPHY. HI 

genesis or order, expressly confines itself to signaliz- 
ing a new beginning of human history, that is, a 
fact exclusively of metaphysical genesis or spiritual 
order. Science to be sure may deny if she pleases 
that there is any metaphysical genesis to human his- 
tory, or that physical fact is a mere witness to the 
activity of spiritual order : but we are no way bound 
to listen to her. She may in short deny any dis- 
crete difference between physics and history, or run 
the mind of man into his own entrails ; but she does 
so only at the risk of degrading her utterances to the 
level of a goose's cackle, and disqualifying herself for 
men's, respect. 

— But now after all let me say that I really stand 
in a much more free and uncommitted relation to 
miracle than you do, or any mere scientific dogmatist. 
For while you are vehemently impelled to reject both 
its actual and its possible truth, I value it as an 
unquestionable race-tradition simply, or deliverance of 
the common mind, and am as little concerned there- 
fore about its literal truth or falsity in a scientific 
point of view, as I am about the truth or falsity of the 
multiplication table, which I learned by heart in my 
uncritical infancy, and the truth of which I have never 
challenged nor suspected since. Were I indeed as 
wise as Sir Isaac Newton I should not know how 
to set about increasing my faith in it; or as acute 



112 MY OWN INTELLECTUAL 

as Professor Huxley, I should be at an utter loss to 
imagine the means of weakening it. For it lies en- 
tirely back of my intellect, being in fact and in part 
its indispensable mother's-milk, or constituting that 
basis of fixed or positive knowledge which is requi- 
site to give my intellect body ; so that to argue with 
me about its truth or falsity is to destroy my mental 
personality, or at the least put its foundations in doubt, 
and leave me consequently at most a mere reasoning 
or gabbling idiot. It is one of those rich gratuitous 
gifts of my race-intelligence to me which are neces- 
sary to constitute my own intellect, or endow me 
consciously for my subsequent intellectual unity and 
fellowship with mankind. And to attribute to me 
therefore a shadow of ability to turn round upon it 
and scrutinize it with a view either to my private 
acceptance or rejection of it, is in my opinion flatly 
to deny my sheer intellectual dependence upon my 
race. 

Just so with this beneficent race-tradition of mira- 
cle : it quite antedates men's turbid scientific judg- 
ments of Divine things, and constitutes a revelation 
to their devout believing hearts of the truth of God's 
sole spiritual existence and activity in the realm of 
man's nature and history, long before their intellect 
is educated to discern it. In the infancy of the race, 
as in that of the individual, the heart in its worship- 



ATTITUDE TOWARDS MIRACLE. 113 

ping innocency is far more impressible to the Divine 
presence in nature than the understanding ; and often 
as in the case before us accepts a truth which the 
slower and more timorous intellect takes centuries 
to interpret. Especially at that early day there was 
no such thing possible as a scientific judgment of the 
mind upon the pretension of Jesus Christ to constitute 
a final revelation of the creative name in humanity. 
Nor, if there had been, do I suppose that the great 
bulk of mankind would have been less obdurately 
indifferent to it, than they are to similar judgments 
in our own day. For, remember, that the pretension 
of Jesus Christ imported no such transparent quack- 
ery as a reform in men's moral relations : for a mere 
moral reform of mankind could not be effected of 
course save with the privity and concurrence of every 
one interested in the result : but was tantamount to 
the spiritual recreation or renewing of their common 
nature, and appealed therefore for its truth to the 
competency of no individual judgment, but to the 
verdict of the great race or nature itself, when its 
personality should be definitely constituted. Espe- 
cially was the gospel clear of tolerating, much more of 
inviting, any ratification at the hands of the philoso- 
pher, or the scientific man, or the religious man, as 
such r but at most it summoned to its ranks every 
bruised and tattered outcast of humanity, through 



114 MY OWN INTELLECTUAL 

whose dilapidated private personality the great race- 
consciousness of mankind might vindicate its sole 
and sovereign truth. Thus these precious facts of 
revelation, whether they fall within the sphere of my 
understanding or my affections, quite transcend the 
grasp of my critical faculty, and impose themselves 
upon my heart as an unmixed good, which I am just 
as incapable of measuring in terms of the analytic 
intellect, or reducing to the contrast of the true and 
the false, as I am of demonstrating to a blind man the 
pleasure of a gorgeous sunset, or reasoning a man 
without a palate into the savor of sugar. 

Doubtless it is not important, dear friend, that 
every specific atom of the human race should in his 
own history vividly reflect this superiority of the 
sacred and tender heart to the comparatively com- 
monplace and misleading intellect; because the for- 
tunes of no individual mind are of much account in 
the development of our natural history. But it is 
vitally important to the race's integral evolution that 
this hierarchical supremacy of heart to head should 
be clearly acknowledged and maintained. For our 
race-evolution constitutes the distinctive and exclusive 
line of Divine revelation, and we, blind and selfish 
egotists that we are, should be little enlightened by 
a revelation that gave truth the supremacy of good 
in human life. Hence the value to the human mind 



ATTITUDE TOWARDS MIRACLE. 115 

of the race's unreasoned traditions, for they alone 
through the utter darkness, and in a crude but 
effectual way, have kept alive the faith of men in 
God's unbroken spiritual providence and government. 
We at this late day, who have lost the interior or 
spiritual perception of Divine truth, cannot help to 
be sure cavilling at the credulity of earlier ages, and 
insisting for our own part that we shall believe only 
what is level to our senses. We have an unques- 
tionable Divine right thus to cheapen truth if we 
like ; but we must bear the inevitable penalty : which 
takes place in a like unquestionable cheapening or 
lowering of our faculty of spiritual insight. I for 
one am not aware of being able to exert the least 
voluntary or personal control over the things of my 
religious life. For religion above all things is what 
identifies me consciously with the life of my kind; 
and I should accordingly feel it nothing short of 
sacrilege to attempt legislating for myself in a matter 
where the race alone was competent. Least of all 
should my scientific conscience empower me so to do ; 
for inasmuch as my scientific conscience is my sole 
legitimate citadel and armory of self-defence against 
unauthorized aggression, I can never have occasion 
to appeal to it against my race, whence alone comes all 
my intellectual nutriment and succor, but only against 
chance individual dogmatism and false pretension. 



116 MY OWN INTELLECTUAL 

Understand me then : I do not care a fig whether 
any of the incidental facts or even the total scope 
of Divine revelation, be regarded as a literal verity or 
not. For if so they contravene no scientific fact, or 
fact of physical order, because they profess on their 
face to be facts of a spiritual or metaphysical order, 
and therefore leave every ordinary fact as well as the 
total course of nature uncontradicted and unimpaired. 
And if they are without literal truth they yet claim 
an infinitely higher — which is a living or spiritual 
— truth, affirmed by consciousness alone. They are 
a truth in other words of man's vital or associated 
consciousness, and science is entirely unqualified either 
to affirm or deny it. Science has no power to pene- 
trate the living consciousness of man ; because her 
observation invariably restricts itself to phenomena 
capable in the last resort of being sensibly appre- 
hended, or reporting themselves to other persons than 
the proper subject of them. Her activity is limited 
to the deceased or reflective consciousness, to con- 
sciousness considered as a spent force, in short, but 
leaving some footprints of its former life on the lower 
sands of sense. Unless therefore we are fully pre- 
pared to accept Comte's judgment of science, and 
look upon it not as an essentially servile sphere of 
the mind, which it is, but as the end or final cause 
of all its precedent stages of progress, we may dis- 



ATTITUDE TOWARDS MIRACLE. 117 

miss it from our further regard as having any legiti- 
mate title either to revise or reorganize our past 
historic evolution, or predict that which is still future. 
I doubt not there are as many foolish scientific men, 
in proportion to the whole number of the adherents 
of science, as there are foolish religious men. And 
we must expect all such accordingly, under the 
prompting of a silly ambition or covetousness, now 
and then to transgress their own territorial limits, 
and sit in presumptuous judgment on the concerns 
of their neighbors. Their religious neighbor at least 
has no call to complain of this, for he himself has 
long set the vicious example. But the one pretension 
is just as disorderly as the other, and I think that the 
better class of scientific men, who have no mercenary 
aims, are perfectly persuaded of this. 

But a truce to this polemic. Science has to do 
only with specific facts, or experiences of sense, ignor- 
ing universals or experiences of the mind ; and she 
has a perfect right therefore, indeed it is her proper 
business, to ontologize on a physical basis, or account 
for species upon rigid time and space principles. But 
existence is spiritual before it is material ; belongs to 
the mind before it comes down to the senses ; is uni- 
versal or dynamical before it is specific or fixed ; and 
Philosophy accordingly, which is the science of Man, 
and deals directly therefore only with mental expe- 



118 INFIRMITY OF THE CRITICAL 

riences, has an equal and indeed prior right to take 
up these logical universals, these dynamics of the 
mind, and account for them on strictly metaphysical 
— that is to say, spiritual — principles. 

And now let us get back to our starting-point, 
which is the conception Swedenborg entertains of 
creation. But before proceeding directly to canvass 
his ideas upon that subject, and as apropos to the 
attitude of the purely scientific mind, I desire to 
quote you a few pages of criticism from his books, 
bearing on the great disadvantages which result to the 
intellect from wantonly rejecting the race-continuity, 
or violently disallowing the absoluteness of knowledge 
in its own sphere. 

" I will show you briefly," he says, " what the 
difference practically amounts to, between an inclina- 
tion to truth and an inclination to good. Those who 
are inclined to truth primarily stick in the letter of 
things, or inquire among themselves whether the thing 
affirmed really exist or not, and whether or not it 
exist thus and so; and only when they have aired 
their doubts sufficiently as to these preliminary mat- 
ters, are they prepared to take up and discuss the 
character of the actual thing itself. Thus they plant 
themselves obstinately upon the threshold of the tem- 
ple of wisdom, and refuse to enter in until all their 
habitual doubts have been dealt with and overcome. 



OR SCEPTICAL UNDERSTANDING. 119 

"On the other hand those who are primarily well- 
affected towards good, and have no regard for truth 
but as its minister or servant, have no perplexity in re- 
gard to the existence of things, but know and perceive 
them to exist not by virtue of their racionative intel- 
lect, but by virtue of the affirmative power of good 
in their heart; and thus they dwell not upon the 
threshold but in the inner chambers of the temple. 
Suppose some one to say for example that it is true 
wisdom to love your neighbor not for his own sake, 
but for the sake of the good manifest in him. Those 
who are in the first instance in the affection of truth, 
that is, in a critical or sceptical state of mind, begin 
at once to speculate whether or not the proposition 
be true, and then stop; while those who are in an 
affirmative state of mind, as loving good first and 
truth subordinately, admit the proposition at once, 
and discern, by virtue of the good they are in, who 
is most truly the neighbor, and in what degree he is 
such, and that all men are neighbors in different de- 
grees. In fact these latter perceive ineffable things 
in truth, while the former admitting no higher inspi- 
ration than truth itself, discern comparatively nothing. 
So also in regard to this allied truth : that he who 
loves his neighbor for the good attaching to him, loves the 
Lord: they who value truth more than good speculate 
whether such be the actual fact of the case or not. 



120 INFIRMITY OF THE CRITICAL 

And if they are told that it must be so, because he 
who loves good in the neighbor more than the neigh- 
bor himself, loves good itself (which good itself the 
Lord alone is) and therefore loves the Lord : they 
again begin to speculate whether it is really so, and 
what good is, and whether good be really more divine 
than truth, and all the rest of it ; and so long as they 
stick to such speculations, they do not catch even the 
most remote glimpse of wisdom.* 

"It is notorious that much of our disputative skill 
at this day goes no further than to put the existence 
of things in doubt. But as long as this habit con- 
tinues, and men are content to debate whether things 
be or not, and whether they be as alleged or not, it is 
impossible to make any progress in wisdom. For 
wisdom grows and thrives only upon the numberless 
particulars which are embraced in the thing whose 
existence is put in doubt ; and as long as this scep- 
ticism on the main point, or as to the certainty of 
knowledge, endures, all these particulars must remain 
unknown and inoperative. Our current erudition is 
almost wholly taken up in inquiring whether things 
exist or not, or whether they exist in such or such a 
manner, and the consequence is that it has no intelli- 
gence of truth. It is surprising how wise people of 
this sort conceive themselves to be in comparison with 

* Arcana Celestia, 2718. 



OR SCEPTICAL UNDERSTANDING. 121 

others j and how they measure their wisdom by their 
skill in argument, and especially by their ability to 
determine it to negative conclusions. But men of 
simple good hearts, whom these high-flyers despise, 
perceive at a glance, without debate or learned 
controversy, both the existence of the thing put in 
doubt, and also its quality. These unsophisticated 
people possess that common-sense perception of truth, 
which the former have extinguished in themselves 
by their inveterate habit of growing disputatious 
about the foundations of knowledge, or the existence 
of truth.* 

" I have sometimes spoken with angels about heav- 
enly dwelling-houses, and said to them that hardly 
any one upon earth believes that angels have need of 
such accommodation ; some because they have no 
sensible proof of the fact ; others because they do not 
know that angels are men ; others still because they 
believe that the angelic heaven is the visible vault 
overhead ; and inasmuch as this vault appears empty, 
and they suppose angels to be ethereal creatures, they 
conclude that angels live in the ether. Besides, as 
they are ignorant of everything spiritual, they have 
no conception how such things can exist in the spirit- 
ual world as exist in the natural. The angels replied 
that this was no news to them, but that it was never- 

* Arcana Celestia, 3428. 



122 INFIRMITY OF THE CRITICAL 

theless matter of surprise to them that such ignorance 
existed chiefly in the church, and rather among 
the intelligent than among those whom these latter 
call the simple. They replied moreover that if these 
ignorant churchmen would only take the testimony 
of the Scriptures they profess to follow on the sub- 
ject, they would see that angels were only human 
beings, and as such requiring houses; and that al- 
though they are spiritual men they are not therefore 
mere ethereal forms as some people ignorantly and 
insanely suppose. They thought moreover that men 
would think of angels truly if they would obey the 
dictate of common sense, which flows in from heaven 
and tells us that angels are human beings \ but the 
moment they put this inward impression in doubt, 
and take to speculating first whether the fact really 
be so, they annihilate the influx which has no longer 
anything to fall into. This occurs among the learned 
mainly who by leaning unduly to their own under- 
standing, shut out heaven from themselves, and the 
approach of light thence. So also every one instinct- 
ively believes in immortal life, and when he does not 
think of the subject from what learned men have had 
to say about it, has no difficulty in believing ; but 
when he reverts to learned hypotheses concerning 
the soul and the doctrine of the body's reunion 
with it, and asks of himself whether immortal life be 



OR SCEPTICAL UNDERSTANDING. 123 

really true or not, of course his instinctive belief is 
dissipated." * 

— I have cited these pregnant passages not so 
much for their own sake, as exemplifying the ex- 
quisite inwardness so to speak of Swedenborg's 
thought — the infinite delicacy and devoutness of 
mind which were habitual to him — as with a view 
to illustrate how profoundly dissident his intellectual 
method is with the whole scope of our modern scien- 
tific research. Happily for us the ontological ques- 
tions which occupy our current scientific speculation 
— questions as to whether "things are or are not," 
which result for the most part in a negative convic- 
tion, as that everything runs into everything else with 
such good- will that at bottom all things are identical, 
with only an evanescent individuality or difference 
attaching to anything — did not occupy him, and we 
have consequently one positive intellect surviving — 
and long destined to survive, as I think — the craziest 
revolutions of our modern thought. The reason why 
these ontological temptations did not assail him, nor 
in any wise bewitch or bedevil his clear understand- 
ing, is that he viewed creation as exclusively a func- 
tion of the Divine life, and hence looked upon nature 
as a covert spiritual dynamics, or sheer involution of 
the spiritual world, not only requiring no being in 

* De Ccelo et Inferno, 183. 



124 SWEDENBOEG AN OUT-AND-OUT REALIST. 

itself, but actually abjuring it as the right exclusively 
of a higher power. Thus he had no shred of a 
tendency to Idealism, but was a realist of the first 
water, a realist of absolutely no nuance whatever, hav- 
ing just as unfeigned a reverence for the senses in 
their sphere as for the soul in its sphere, and prac- 
tically therefore just as incapable of confounding the 
two spheres as any carman you may meet upon the 
street. 






LETTER XII. 




Y DEAR FRIEND : — Creation with 
Swedenborg is the alpha and the omega 
of Philosophy. Bat then be very sure to 
understand that the creation he thus re- 
gards as the fundamental postulate of philosophy is 
not the least a mechanical exhibition of Divine power, 
consisting in giving the creature finite or phenomenal 
existence, but, on the contrary, an altogether living or 
spiritual achievement, whereby God communicates Him- 
self to the creature, in the plenitude of His infinite and 
eternal being. He views creation as a spontaneous 
work of God, that is, a work of delight; because God, 
being infinite love — which means love without any 
drawback or limitation of self-love — lives only by 
communicating Himself to whatsoever is not Himself. 
And men commonly, you know, conceive of creation 
as a voluntary work of God, effected in time and 
space, whereby He makes all things out of stark 



126 CREATION A SPONTANEOUS WORK. 

nought, and which therefore He might, had it so 
pleased Him, have altogether forborne to accomplish. 
Swedenborg then stamps this conception of creative 
power as utterly sensuous and puerile, inasmuch as 
space and time with all their contents possess no 
reality save to an infirm or imperfect intelligence. 
There never was a space, according to him, where 
creation was not, nor a time when it was not. In 
other words, space and time fall exclusively within 
the created intelligence, and constitute the broadest 
or most common form of the natural mind. There is 
no such thing, that is, no such objective existence, as 
space or time, save to our sensuous judgment. We, 
by nature, are densely ignorant of the spiritual links 
that bind the universe of existence together, and our 
flickering reason, following the dictate of sense, sub- 
stitutes for these the obvious liaisons of space and 
time. Thus they are both of them mere terms of 
relation supplied by our infirm intelligence between 
the various objects of our senses, and the various events 
of history. They constitute a mental background, as 
I have said, the one to our perception of existence, 
the other to our perception of life ; the one being 
fundamental to our conception of tilings, the other to 
our conception of events. They neither of them have 
any positive force, space signifying nothing but the 
absence to our perception of limitation (or the finite), 



NATURE UNREAL AND IMPERSONAL. 127 

and time the absence of eventuality (or the rela- 
tive).* 

But if space and time bear no semblance of reality 
to creative thought, and possess at best but a bare 
semblance of it even to man's spiritual intelligence, 
then of course we must expect Swedenborg to deny 
all reality to Nature, for nature is conditioned in space 
and time, being the sum total of the limitations of 
the one and the vicissitudes of the other. And this is 

* In fact, they are negative witnesses to the mind of the infinity and 
eternity which are alone competent to the explanation of existence. 
Space, whenever I affirm it, and in so far forth as it is affirmed, means, 
neither more nor less, the absence to my perception of sensible limita- 
tion, and time the absence of eventuality. Thus the space of a mile 
upon the earth's surface is an explicit denial within that interval of any 
limitation, and to that extent of course an implicit affirmation of the in- 
finitude which subtends all existence. And the time of an hour or a 
day or a year of the earth's history means the denial within that interval 
of any eventuality to my perception, and hence an affirmation by impli- 
cation of the eternity which subtends all our experience. In short, 
space, being the logical background of existence to our perception — 
being the necessary fulcrum or purchase which our intelligence exacts 
in order to its discernment of finite existence — must needs constitute a 
negative or inverse attestation to the essential infinitude which underlies 
all the phenomena of nature, simply because there is no logical negation 
of infinitude but sensible limitation. And time, being in like manner 
only the logical background of eventuality to our perception — being 
the necessary shadow exacted by our imperfect intelligence in order to 
its discernment of relative existence — is an inverse or negative remem- 
brancer of the essential eternity which underlies and animates all the 
phenomena of history. 



128 NATURE UNREAL AND IMPERSONAL. 

what in truth he actually does. He systematically 
denies a natural creation, and limits the creative ac- 
tivity in nature to a purely redemptive significance and 
efficacy. Thus nature has no existence to Sweden- 
borg but what is conferred upon it by our most obscure 
and unveracious intelligence in spiritual or Divine 
things. It is but the dense mask which the spiritual 
creation puts on to the sensuous intelligence, the under- 
standing limited and dominated by sense. There is 
no such entity or thing as nature to the spiritual appre- 
hension ; for to that apprehension the mental generali- 
zation to which we give the name of nature and thence 
postulate as real, is merely a sign of our crude inade- 
quate thought, and implies nought beyond that. The 
various forms of our sensible experience, mineral, 
vegetable, and animal, exist to the spiritual intelli- 
gence much more vividly than to ours, but the mental 
attribution which we make of all these forms to some 
unitary or universal substance called Nature, it utterly 
refuses to make, because the only unitary or universal 
substance it recognizes as underlying nature's forms, 
is not nature but Man. In fact, our term Nature ex- 
presses only the indolent mental judgment which we 
in our ignorance of spiritual laws instinctively frame 
to account for the origin of existence. We have an 
intuitive apprehension of the generic or universal iden- 
tity which underlies and binds together the objects 



NATURE UNREAL AND IMPERSONAL. 129 

of our senses, notwithstanding their specific diversity ; 
but we are intellectually incompetent to refer this 
identity to its true source, which is the human mind, 
and postulate for it meanwhile the supposititious sub- 
stance which we term Nature, and which means noth- 
ing more after all than the mental sum or aggregate 
of our impressions of space and time. Everything 
embraced in sense exists in a particular place and at 
a particular time, and by abstracting these particulars, 
or universalizing their contents, we fancy ourselves 
arrived at a most real or objective existence, instead 
of a purely apparitional or subjective one, and un- 
hesitatingly name it Nature, venerable mother of ail 
living. 

We cannot, then, dear friend, too clearly make up 
our minds that Nature does not exist in herself, or 
absolutely, but only as an hallucination of our rudi- 
mentary intelligence, Divinely permitted, and indeed 
engineered, in the interest of our eventual spiritual 
sanity. What we call by the familiar name of Na- 
ture, and find our chief imaginative activity in personi- 
fying, is not so much as a thing even, but all simply 
a most strict process or functioning of the Divine love 
and wisdom towards our spiritual manhood. It is 
nothing more nor less than the living method which 
the creative energy adopts in order to spiritual pro- 
lification. Spiritual existence, you know, cannot be 



130 IT IS A FUNCTIONING OF DIVINE LOVE 

directly propagated. The bare conception of such a 
thing is nugatory, since the existence so propagated 
would be without natural or conscious projection from 
its creative source; while the fundamental postulate 
of spiritual existence is that it be both conscious and 
spontaneous. But it can be propagated indirectly : 
i. e. by the ministry of what we call Nature ; for na- 
ture has a quasi existence or selfhood to our intelli- 
gence, upon which the Divine may subsequently and 
to any extent mould His own more real and perfect 
communication. Omne vivum ex ovo. That is to 
say, there is no form possible to our apprehension 
without its appropriate substance; nothing exists to 
our understanding except from some previous ground 
of existence. No farmer expects next year's crop 
unless he sow this year's wheat. No man can become 
a father without the mediation of a wife. Could the 
father beget offspring, and the farmer produce a crop 
directly from themselves, the product in both cases 
would manifestly be visionary, since there could be 
no basis of discrimination in either case between prod- 
uct and producer. In like manner precisely the archi- 
tect of the spiritual creation accomplishes His work, 
not by the exhibition of magical or irrational power, 
not by any idle and pompous incantation addressed 
to empty air, but solely by the inward fecundation of 
natural germs existing in our sensuous intelligence, and 



TOWARDS OUR SPIRITUAL MANHOOD. 131 

the consequent development of a spiritual progeny 
every way commensurate with His own perfection. 

— Anyhow, right or wrong, the fact is precisely 
what I have stated: Swedenborg makes nature the 
realm of uncreation: and by that unexpected word 
sends a breath of health to the deepest heart of hell. 
It is what neither is nor exists in itself, but only seems 
to be and exist to a subject intelligence. But its use 
as such seeming is incomparably great. Tor it edu- 
cates the mind, by giving a logical background to 
existence, or enabling the creature to distinguish what 
is real or generic in things from what is merely phe- 
nomenal and specific, so furnishing a basis for the sub- 
sequent development of his spiritual intelligence, or 
his living perception of the Divine name. Thus in 
Swedenborg 's doctrine of creation nature plays the 
precise part which " nothing " is made to play in the 
ordinary theory. For, as I have said, creation is vul- 
garly conceived to be a strictly magical * or irrational 

* Magic is the power of instantaneous creation : the art of produ- 
cing things irrationally, or without the use of means, thus by sheer 
force of will, and without any aid of the understanding. It is the 
pretension to produce offspring without maternity, form without sub- 
stance, soul without body, spirit without flesh, life without existence. 
So that if God should create spiritual existence, as we commonly sup- 
pose Him to have done — i. e. directly or without nature's interven- 
tion — not only would He confess Himself a mere flashy showman or 
conjurer, but the existence so created would turn out a monstrous im- 



132 THE EDUCATIVE USE 

procedure of God, whereby He evokes all things out 
of nothing. The common people hold so unscrupu- 
lously to this idea, that persons among them of very 
good intelligence have no doubt that the magic which 
creates might again, if it pleased, reduce what is cre- 
ated to its primeval " nothing "-ness. Now it is easy 
to see the part which " nothing " is made to play in 
this popular hypothesis of creation. It serves precisely 
to emphasize or underscore existence, to give it that 

posture utterly devoid of rational depth or character: for manifestly 
the stream cannot transcend its source, and if the creator be a charla- 
tan, the creature must a fortiori be a deception. Our theologies, of 
course, intend no dishonor to the creative name but the contrary when 
they represent the spiritual creation as devoid of natural substance, or 
as being the instantaneous product of God's unlimited will. But nev- 
ertheless magical or irrational power is the only power they implicitly 
ascribe to God's perfection. I know of no pulpit which does not habitu- 
ally interpret the Divine omnipotence into a faculty of unlimited hocus 
pocus, or irrational and immediate creation from Himself : thus into a 
power of purely arbitrary or capricious — which is essentially mad — 
action; a power of doing as he wills, without regard either to the be- 
neficent ends His infinite love conceives in endowing his creatures with 
life, or to the exquisite means His infinite wisdom provides in order to 
carry those ends out. They thus in effect make God's glory to lie in 
His really being what every low juggler in the land only makes believe 
to be, namely : a maker of something out of nothing ; and hence they 
fix their votaries in an attitude of such insincere worship towards the 
most High, as to vindicate even to a cursory intelligence the foresight 
of Christ, when he predicted that the professional religion of his own 
nominal followers would prove the chief obstacle to his second or 
spiritual advent. 



OF OUR NATURAL EXPERIENCE. 133 

logical relief, background, or mother-substance which 
it needs in order to be recognized by our intelligence, 
and which in Swedenborg's more philosophic view is 
supplied by nature. 

Thus the popular mind cuts itself off from any 
just insight into the philosophy of creation, because 
it holds to nature as created, and consequently is 
obliged to resort to " nothing," or non-existence, as 
the only conceivable mother-substance out of which 
it could be fashioned. To show the fallacy of the 
church cosmogony, accordingly, nothing more is 
needed than to deny its fundamental principle, which 
is, the existence of " nothing," or the reality of non- 
existence. Nothing does not exist in rerum naturd. 
Things and persons, or objective and subjective ex- 
istences, divide the entire realm of nature between 
them ; and to claim that " nothing " exists, neverthe- 
less, in some preposterous Umbo beyond the realm, of 
nature, and constitutes that unthinkable substance out 
of which nature was educed, is a denial of the spiritual 
world, and convicts the claimant of gross philosophic 
fatuity. For if " nothing " exists beyond nature, spirit 
or life has no existence. In fact " nothing," in this 
depraved cosmologic sense of it, is a term invented to 
cover or eke out men's infirm conception of being. 
Men conceive of being not as inwardly or logically — 
but as outwardly or ontologically — generated ; that is 



134 GENESIS OF THIS ABSURD 

to say, as constituted or made up of mere existence in 
space and time. The tree before my window appar- 
ently exists in space and time, and this appearance is 
enough to give the tree being to the popular imagina- 
nation. Cut the tree down accordingly, and you 
have a corresponding dearth of being, which men 
express by saying that " nothing " really exists in the 
tree's place. In short, they regard specific existence 
as the presence of being, and specific non-existence as 
the absence of it ; and hence, as I have already said, 
they regard being as ontologically constituted, that is, 
as made up of existence in time and space. Whereas 
the very most you are entitled to say in the premises is, 
that being is apparently manifested by existence, and 
manifested, moreover, to a style of intelligence which 
is entirely unacquainted with what being is in truth. 
Your image in a looking-glass is an apparent mani- 
festation of your existence, or even of your being as 
thus ontologically conceived : but surely you would 
never allow that your being or your existence was in 
any way constituted by such appearance. 

To the ordinary apprehension the creator is a per- 
son, and exists, as a person necessarily must exist, in 
space and time ; and creation to the same apprehen- 
sion is a thing, also existing or projected from Him in 
space and time, but involving infinitely less than He 
does of these ontological elements. The creature of 



COSMOLOGICAL "NOTHING." 135 

Divine power is doubtless popularly held to be in- 
finitely inferior to the creator in other respects also, as 
in love, in wisdom, and in power ; but the difference 
between them which dominates every other is this 
brutal personal difference, arising from the assumed 
infinitude of the one in time and space, and the 
obvious finiteness of the other in those regards. It is 
this low carnal estimate of the creative truth which 
turns all our sectarian theology into rank intellectual 
poison, and renders it exquisitely nauseous to every 
heart and mind at all emancipated from sense. It 
takes for granted that the creature is his own spiritual 
or real being as well as his own natural or phenome- 
nal form, and hence exhibits the creator, who is thus 
excluded from any internal relation to the creature, 
as restricted to a purely external activity towards him, 
or an interference with his freedom so very wanton 
and malignant as ends by filling the world with every 
sinister apprehension of the Divine name. It is the 
same superstitious conception of creation which is em- 
bodied in the letter of revelation. Swedenborg no 
doubt justifies it in its own place, that is, in accommo- 
dation to the early or uninstructed scientific intelli- 
gence of the race, while as yet the sciences of obser- 
vation had not come to fill that intelligence out, or 
give it body, by interpreting Nature into Man. He 
regards it both as in itself a very gross and misleading 



136 CREATION AS A LETTER 

effigy of the creative idea, and at the same time prac- 
tically as an altogether invaluable one, because it was 
so eminently fitted to be lodged in the servile memory 
or devout imagination of the race, until such time as 
men's intelligence should have become quickened to 
discern the living and spiritual truth of the case. 
Thus it all the while bears to his imagination, in this 
crude literal form, just as inverse a resemblance to 
the eternal truth of things, as an egg bears to the 
chicken which is eventually to be hatched from it, or 
as the squalid sand of the sea bears to the gorgeous 
temples and palaces of living art which are yet to be 
wrought from its dismal wastes. 

We see, then, dear friend, that in Swedenborg's 
view, no intellectual interest attaches to the creative 
problem in so far as it is scientific merely, or contem- 
plates creation itself not as a spiritual, living, or re- 
generate result exclusively, but only as a quasi-living, 
natural, or generate one. A universe of animals might 
furnish an agreeable spectacle to the human intelli- 
gence, and even awaken in it admiration of the crea- 
tive power ; only there would be then no human in- 
telligence present, no intelligence capable of enjoying 
the spectacle, or recognizing the power displayed in 
it to be Divine. The human intellect is not bred of 
any observation of the order of nature, or capacity of 
adaptation between it and the mind ; it is originally 



AN IMMENSE FALLACY. 137 

quickened and born of man's adoring heart, or of his 
perception that nature manifests a power superior to 
itself to which all his moral and rational allegiance is 
due. And this power he recognizes as Divine only 
because it is miraculous, that is, able to originate a 
free or spontaneous style of life capable of immortal 
fellowship with Himself. The highest and best in- 
tellect of man grows out of his worshipful heart ; and 
his heart's worship, whenever real, is energized by 
the conviction that God's perfection is most distinc- 
tively human, or without personal ends; in other 
words, that God is great enough in absolutely reject- 
ing every man's personal or interested homage, to 
care solely and above all things for every man's spir- 
itual or living sympathy and fellowship. 

With these hints you will not be likely to do in- 
justice to Swedenborg's comprehensive treatment of 
creation in shutting it up to the sphere of conscious- 
ness. I have tried to bring out the motherly char- 
acter of his teaching, the incomparably tender and 
succulent aspect which it bears to the guileless, 
unmercenary heart of man. The difference, in fact, 
between his teaching and that of all our laborious 
philosophic journeymen from Descartes down to the 
modern scientific school of thought, is the differ- 
ence between mother's milk and a Strasburg pate : 
the former teaching being addressed exclusively to 



138 CREATION HAS NO LOCUS IN QUO 

the needs of a nascent and most tender spiritual intel- 
ligence in man, the latter to the wants of a debauched 
and worn-out intellectual digestion, living only upon 
stimulants. Swedenborg's primary demand upon his 
reader is a heart attuned to goodness ; and he leaves 
what subsequent truth he reports to his intellect 
fearlessly and without argument to the heart's sole 
arbitrament. And every man who sincerely loves the 
neighbor, or whose zeal for the human race is at 
least equal to the zeal he is in the habit of expending 
on his own account, is bound eventually to stumble 
on his unostentatious books, and reap the abundant 
stores of nutriment there and nowhere else pro- 
vided for the intellect. Swedenborg never betrays by 
any chance the least of an intellectual self-conscious- 
ness, and yet, if intellectual power is to be measured 
by the measure of truth possessed, it would seem un- 
affectedly ludicrous, to any one acquainted with his 
writings, that any other person in the intellectual 
history of the race should " be named," as they say, 
"in the same day with him." Tor even the Divine 
creation itself, being a spiritual or living truth, is not 
the least with him an outward or objective event, but 
falls with all its miraculous machinery of space and 
time, or all the vaunted life of nature, so-called, clean 
within the compass of the human understanding ; and is 
a truth therefore of our growing human consciousness 



BUT THE HUMAN CONSCIOUSNESS. 139 

exclusively, coming home to the business and bosoms 
of the race as no other truth begins to do. Tor what 
in brief is creation spiritually pronounced ? It is the 
evolution of mans nature in exact harmony with the 
Divine perfection, or its plenary redemption out of 
selfish into social form and order. It does not contem- 
plate, save by implication, either our unconscious 
physical genesis, or our conscious moral exodus, but 
addresses itself directly and exclusively to the spiritual- 
ization of our nature. It is life eternal to Jcnoiv God ; 
and hence creation in any wise estimation can only 
mean the purification of our natural Knowledge, the 
exaltation of our flesh-and-blood consciousness, until 
it compasses infinitude. It can only mean, in other 
words, giving the creature universal spiritual or social 
form, never particular moral or physical substance. 
The creator, of course, takes these lower things for 
granted: physical substance being implied in moral 
form, and moral substance in social or spiritual form, 
just as the foundation of the house is implied in the 
house, or earth in heaven, effect in cause, stream in 
fountain. So Swedenborg shows all lower things to 
be involved in higher, physical in moral, and moral in 
spiritual, existence, but never confounds the two. By 
thus planting the creative problem on higher ground 
than it has ever before occupied, or carrying it back 
to the infinite heart of God, he has anticipated every 



140 ITS SOLE AND TOTAL METHOD : REDEMPTION. 

really intellectual obstacle to the acknowledgment of 
creation : since these obstacles all pivot upon the diffi- 
culty of accounting for finite existence, or reconcil- 
ing the creature's identity with the infinitude of the 
creator. 



LETTER XIII. 




Y DEAR FRIEND: — It is popularly 
conceived that the world is administered 
on positive and not on negative princi- 
ples; in an active and not in a passive 
manner; in a way for example to promote the ease, 
honor, and emolument of the administrator, and not 
to cause him shame, confusion, and anguish. The 
Creator is universally supposed to occupy a position 
of the grossest sensible objectivity to the creature, a 
position fruitful on occasion of the greatest conceiv- 
able tyranny and oppression ; and the creature a posi- 
tion of the subtlest spiritual subjectivity to the Cre- 
ator, a position susceptible on occasion of the greatest 
conceivable dread, horror, and aversion. 

Now this reputed relation between God and man 
in the first instance, and man and God in the second, 
is in the point of view of Philosophy an immense 
illusion ; because Philosophy identifies the subjective 
element in the creative equation exclusively with the 



142 GOD THE SOLE SUBJECT IN CREATION, 

Creator, and the objective element exclusively with 
the creature. That is to say: Philosophy regards 
creation not as a material or mechanical, but as a 
purely spiritualor living operation of God in the 
created nature ; and hence cannot help looking upon 
the Creator alone as the proper subject of the opera- 
tion, and upon the creature alone as its proper object. 
For creation, being spiritual or living, consists, first, 
in a communication on the Creator's part of His own 
life or being to the creature ; and evidently this com- 
munication stamps the Creator as essentially subjec- 
tive to His creature, that is, essentially passive or 
suffering in his behalf; and, secondly, in a reaction 
or receptivity on the creature's part to such commu- 
nication : and this reaction or receptivity evidently 
stamps the creature as essentially objective to the 
Creator; that is, essentially active or joyous. In 
other words creation spiritually regarded makes the 
Creator the sole and total subjective life of the crea- 
ture, and the creature in his turn the sole and total 
objective life of the Creator. The vulgar misconcep- 
tion of it, accordingly, by which man is made God's 
submissive subject, and God is made man's control- 
ling object, is grossly illusory to Philosophy; but it 
is an illusion, nevertheless, which is strictly incidental 
to the creature's unripe intelligence, and hence claims 
above all things to be understood, not denounced. 



MAN THE SOLE OBJECT. 143 

It is logically in fact the very essence of the cre- 
ative idea, that creation is practically a marriage of 
Creator and creature, whereby the creature alone spir- 
itually is, or becomes infinited in the Creator, while 
the Creator alone naturally exists, or becomes finite, 
in the creature : so that the creature has at most only 
a seeming or phenomenal existence in himself, even 
while he has at the same time a most real or abso- 
lute and unqualified being in his Creator. It is true 
enough no doubt that the creature — through his 
bottomless ignorance on one hand of the truth that 
creation is a purely spiritual work of God in the 
created nature, and through his bottomless conceit 
on the other that it is an altogether shabby natural 
work of God effected in the creature's petty self— 
egregiously misinterprets this fundamental logic, or 
attributes to himself and not to the Creator his natu- 
ral or finite personality, while he remains persistently 
blind and deaf to the spiritual and infinite being he 
and all his kind have in God. But the spiritual 
truth of the case is not a whit inwardly altered or 
even prejudiced by this mistake ; it is only outwardly 
obscured or deadened. What alone happens is that 
the spiritual or creative truth is obliged to lower 
itself to the creature's sensuous and grovelling imagi- 
nation, by masking itself in moral lineaments, or 
taking the creature at his own stupid estimate of 



144 CREATION ONLY A PHILOSOPHIC NAME 

himself, and addressing him as if he were in truth 
his own natural substance, and God himself conse- 
quently his mere outward and moral or regulative 
law. And this is literally all that happens. Crea- 
tion becomes converted in men's infirm understand- 
ing from a spiritual, or infinite and eternal, Divine 
life in the unconscious nature of the creature, which 
has therefore strictly public or universal issues in 
humanity, into a mere legal or moral administration 
of Divine power in the conscious person of the crea- 
ture, having at best therefore strictly private or par- 
ticular issues. 

Let creation, then, in the sole and exclusive spir- 
itual truth of the word, remain perfectly intact, dear 
friend, to our particular faith, whether all the world, 
say us nay or yea. Let it be to us both forever 
nothing else than an inmost and inseparable life of 
God within the strictest limits of our nature, where- 
by that nature — gladly responsive to such an un- 
precedented subject ! — becomes freely redeemed out 
of its otherwise inveterate personal or selfish linea- 
ments, into the imperishable image and likeness of 
God most High, that is, into grandly social form 
and order. Neither you nor I have ever had, have 
now, or ever shall have, any particle of just or ra- 
tional hope towards God which is based either 
upon any possible personal difference in us to other 



FOR OUR NATURAL REDEMPTION. 145 

men, or any possible personal difference in us to 
ourselves in past time, but solely and wholly upon 
His own reconciling spirit or temper in universal 
man, whereby we and all men become gradually 
softened and refined out of our natural egotism and 
savagery, by being lifted out of our petty egotistic 
moral consciousness, and becoming gradually in- 
vested with social or race-consciousness. This is 
what creation, spiritually regarded, means, and all it 
means, not any stupid and brutal event in space 
and time, transcending human nature and antedat- 
ing human history, but a most real and authentic 
life of God identical with human nature and con- 
substantiate with human history : beginning with 
that history, animating all its movements, keeping 
steadfast pace with it through all its marvellous vicis- 
situdes and revolutions, and bringing it at length 
to its grand triumphant climax in the coming splen- 
dors of the mystical city of God. Thus our spirit- 
ual creation is only the truer or philosophic name 
for our distinctively natural redemption ■ since 
nothing short of this redemptive work can establish 
the Divine claim to be a universal creator. I know, 
for my own part at least, very well, that it must 
prove a " scandal " to our imitative modern Juda- 
ism, and " foolishness " to our simulated modern 
Hellenism, but I cannot help saying all the same, 



146 WHAT DO WE MEAN 

nor rejoicing as I say it, that I look upon the fast- 
approaching close of our corrupt civilization in the 
New Jerusalem — which is the Gospel symbol for 
the evolution of a free society, fellowship, or equal- 
ity of all men with each and each with all on earth 
and in heaven — as the veritable apotheosis of our 
nature, since it will reveal and vindicate to eternal 
years, not the truth of God's spiritual or essential 
manhood, for that has been long acknowledged, but 
to us the infinitely more momentous because infi- 
nitely more prolific, truth of His natural or ad- 
ventitious manhood : a manhood forced upon Him, 
so to speak, in the interest of the strictly universal 
— which are the lowest corporeal and sensual — 
needs of His creature. 

But what precisely do we mean by the created 
nature ? 

"Nature," then, when used abstractly means the 
realm of the undefined or relative in knowledge ; 
means that vast potentiality of existence which per- 
petually allures and at the same time baffles the 
grasp of science, inasmuch as it is always becom- 
ing, yet never is definitively known. It signifies 
what is generic, impersonal, or universal in exist- 
ence, in contradistinction to what is specific, personal, 
or particular. It is not of course what creates, that 
is, gives invisible being or substance to things ; but 



BY THE TERM NATURE? 147 

only what constitutes them, that is, gives them vis- 
ible form or existence. It is the maternal principle 
in existence, thus what produces all things or gives 
them body, in opposition to the paternal principle 
which begets them, or gives them soul. In short, 
Nature is what all men instinctively believe in, yet 
what no man has ever had sensible contact with. 
We cannot help believing in it, because we see it 
revealed as we think in its endlessly varied phe- 
nomena or productions ; but we have and can have 
no direct acquaintance with it, because it is not the 
least a fact of sense, but at most a probable truth 
of science. From the necessity of the case, or in 
the interest of science itself, it must always remain 
a merely probable — that is, a strictly undemonstrated 
— truth: for if Nature, or the universe of our sci- 
entific faith, could once be grasped by observation, 
and so be forced to confess itself Thing instead of 
Thought, science would ipso facto lose her whole 
intellectual capital, would forfeit in fact her sole 
raison d'etre, and be obliged to tumble inconti- 
nently back into the arms of sense. To be sure we 
talk very glibly of "the laws of Nature"; and 
where " laws " are of recognized obligation, it should 
be presumable at least that the lawgiver is very 
distinctly known. But these so-called "laws of na- 
ture " are laws of human thought exclusively, and 



148 NATURE A STRICTLY SUBJECTIVE, 

laws of nature only in so far as nature itself is 
taken for a symbol of the mind. That is to say, 
they are only so many scientific generalizations on 
our part based upon sensible observation, whereby 
the mind moved by a profound instinct of its spir- 
itual origin and destiny, seeks unconsciously to uni- 
versalize itself y and so wrest from "Nature" the 
provisional or educative and superstitious homage it 
has so long enjoyed. 

Nature in short, thus abstractly viewed, is the only 
purely subjective existence we are acquainted with, 
inasmuch as it never falls under the cognizance of 
our senses, but invariably posits itself as the attri- 
bute of a subject, and utterly refuses to be cogi- 
tated apart from such subjectivity. It is true that 
some one may object to regarding nature as this 
strictly subjective or metaphysical quantity, on the 
ground that we are in the habit of applying the 
term to the external world, which is made up of 
sensibly objective existences. But it is a sufficient 
answer to this objection to say that we always 
apply the term to the world as a whole, or by way 
of discriminating what is generic or universal in 
the sphere of sense, even, from what is specific or 
particular ; and universals claim no physical but a 
purely logical or metaphysic subsistence. The world 
or universe is not a thing of sense, but a pure 



OR METAPHYSICAL EXISTENCE. 149 

thought of the mind ; and when we designate it 
accordingly by the name of nature, the effect is not 
to degrade nature into a physical substance, but to 
elevate the world itself, regarded as a universe or 
whole, into a metaphysic substance. Whatsoever 
exists to sense is practically or at bottom nothing 
else than a concrete or specific form of the logical 
or metaphysic not-me ; and outward nature, conse- 
quently, regarded as the universal term in which 
alone all our sense perceptions are supposed to co- 
here, is in its turn but the abstract or generic 
form of this negative judgment on our part. 

Then too it ought to be noted, in reply to the 
objection just made, that when the word Nature is 
applied to the external world, or the phenomena of 
sense, it is used just as much to signify the field 
of the subjective and relative which we find there: 
only the relations existing between minerals, plants, 
and animals are outward or objective relations exclu- 
sively, which are wholly unknown to and unperceived 
by the minerals, plants, and animals themselves, and 
which consequently presuppose and address our com- 
manding subjectivity alone. The animal for exam- 
ple has no science of the relations of agreement or 
difference which bind him to his own and other 
species, although he instinctively obeys them doubt- 
less ; for they exist only to another eye than his 



150 CONCRETE USES OF THE WORD. 

own. And all that the observant eye of our science 
cares to signalize in these relations is that they 
characterize the animal nature apart from any vis- 
ible or objective subject of it. 

All the concrete uses of the word betray the 
same universalizing or undefining scope and ten- 
dency. What we call the nature of a horse, of a 
dog, of a bull, is not what belongs primarily to 
any particular animal so-named, but to the entire 
horse, dog, or bull species or kind ; although the 
particular animals in question may be at the same 
time exceptionably favorable specimens of their race. 
And so throughout the whole compass of the word's 
concrete application : the nature of a particular min- 
eral, vegetable, or animal, is in every case strictly 
what universalizes, or equalizes, or identifies it with 
its species or kind, and so far forth of course in- 
dividualizes it from all other kinds. But it confers 
no private individuality upon it, that is, no spirit- 
ual or subjective discrimination with its own kind. 
We say to be sure that one man has a good nature, 
and another an evil nature : meaning by that phrase, 
that the one is sensitive and the other indifferent 
to his legal obligations. But all we are really en- 
titled to say in the premises is, not that the men 
are of a different nature, but that human nature 
itself is of so universal a range or quality as to 



CONCRETE USES OF THE WORD. 151 

embrace a relatively high and a relatively low ele- 
ment, or exhibit in itself the sheer neutrality, in- 
difference, or equilibrium of good and evil: so that 
any particular subject of it may be morally good, 
and any other particular subject morally evil, with- 
out the slightest strain or compromise, on either 
side, of their common nature. For human nature is 
distinctively social in form, being the unity of self- 
love and neighborly love — thus of what is widest 
or most universal in affection and thought, and what 
is narrowest or most particular — - and the morally 
good man accordingly is one in whom the higher 
element practically rules, while the morally evil man 
is one in whom that element is made practically to 
serve. In short they are men of a strictly identical 
nature, and their moral divergence is due to the 
fact that until human nature shall have attained to 
its destined sabbath in the permanent social evolu- 
tion of the race, the greatest possible antagonism, 
consistent with providential order, must necessarily 
prevail between its component factors — to the ex- 
tent even of organizing the entire spiritual world 
into the divided spheres of heaven and hell. 

Understand then, dear friend, that there is no such 
tidng, or congeries of things, as what we call nature, 
or universal existence. All real existence is specific 
or particular, so that natural, generic, or universal 



152 NATURE REALIZABLE TO THOUGHT, 

existence is never physical but metaphysical, discern- 
ible therefore not by sense, but exclusively by life or 
consciousness. It is realizable to thought, but not to 
sight, and herein differs from specific existence which 
is realizable to sight, but not to thought. The earth 
really exists in space, and plant and animal really 
exist upon it clothing it with life and beauty. But 
strive as we may, we cannot think these existences ; 
cannot for the life of us think either earth or plant or 
animal ; and for the very good reason that they all of 
them anticipate and supersede thought, being already 
given to us in sense. We can recall them to mem- 
ory whenever we list ; but we cannot possibly think 
them as we think God and man, or goodness and 
truth, grace and beauty, holiness and peace, justice 
and mercy, simply because they rigidly forestall our 
intelligence, or what is the same thing, because un- 
like spiritual existence they have no inward or living 
but a purely outward and sensible objectivity to us. 
It is no way true of course to say that the objects of 
sense into which we are born, spiritually create our 
intelligence or give it soul ; but it is perfectly true to 
say that they materially constitute it, or give it body, 
cradling and nursing it indeed upon the chaste 
breasts of their maternity, until such time as it is fit 
to be weaned from sense, and fed upon truth alone. 
But we do unquestionably think nature or universal 



BUT NOT TO SENSE. 153 

existence, and can do no more than think it ; because 
it is not the least given us in sense, but is on the 
contrary a most strict projection of the spiritual 
world, or the associated human mind, upon our pri- 
vate and personal thought. We do not see nature or 
the universe ; neither do we hear it, nor smell it, nor 
taste it, nor touch it. And being thus wholly inac- 
cessible to our senses, it can never fall within the 
conditions of our memory even; for we can remem- 
ber nothing and imagine nothing w T hich is wholly 
divorced from sense. But we think nature or uni- 
versal existence day and night; and we think noth- 
ing else. Our living intellect — which is heart and 
mind in actual unison- — broods upon it, feeds upon 
it, waxes fat upon it, vehemently denies itself at last 
either anchorage or sustenance apart from it. We 
love and cherish it, we confide in it, we adore it, we 
aspire to it, we associate our eternal fortunes with it 
— do everything in short but pretend outwardly or 
sensibly to know it. 

But what we want just now is to discover the 
exact intellectual significance of human nature, that 
we may be able to assign its due philosophic weight 
and function in the evolution of the spiritual creation. 
Let us accordingly address ourselves forthwith to this 
latter interest. 

As by the nature of a thing we always mean to 



154 HUMAN NATURE IS THE SPHERE 

express what to the eye of science gives the thing 
objective relation with other things, so too by human 
nature we mean to express the sphere exclusively of 
the relative in human life, only the relations which 
connect man with man are not such as can be scien- 
tifically discerned. They are not, like the other, ex- 
ternal relations which address the sense; they are 
internal relations, which appeal for their truth only 
to consciousness. This establishes a great discrep- 
ancy between human and brute life. The relations 
which exist between man and man, and which reflect 
their characteristically human nature, are not, like 
those of the animal, outward and organic. Man to 
be sure has these outward and organic relations also 
to his fellow-man, but it is only in so far as he is yet 
undivorced from animal, or uneducated into man. 
The relations which bind the partakers of human 
nature together, as such, are intensely living and con- 
scious, or inward and aesthetic, instead of outward 
and organic. They are relations, not of appetite and 
passion, controlled by necessity and duty, but of taste 
or attraction, governed exclusively by the freedom or 
spontaneity of the parties ; and consequently, as the 
saying is, they never leave any bad taste in the 
mouth behind them. The contrary is well known to 
be the case when men identify themselves with the 
animal nature, and cherish its lower delights : for in 



OF MAN'S SUBJECTIVE RELATIONS. 155 

so doing they only reap disgust, degradation, and 
frequent despair. This sharp discrepancy of the hu- 
man nature with the brute nature is owing of course 
to the truth of the spiritual creation, and is one of its 
most constant attestations. Man's nature, whatever 
the splendors of Divine power incident to it, is after 
all nothing but a vehicle of transcendent spiritual 
blessing to the man himself; whereas the brute na- 
ture knows no such spiritual subserviency. And 
when accordingly the subject of the higher nature 
persistently identifies himself with the lower, he is 
sure to find in his way every sharp regret and bitter 
humiliation which may tend to frighten him back 
into his place. Otherwise he would be like a noble 
house ruined by bad drainage. 

And now, dear friend, I think you and I have 
attained to a pretty definite notion of what consti- 
tutes human nature. Human nature is the field 
exclusively of man's subjective relations to his kind, 
and constitutes therefore the realm of identity among 
men, the realm in which all men, whatever may be 
their individual or spiritual differences to their own 
eye, are one and undistinguishable to God. And 
being such it is the appanage or attribute of course 
of a conscious or living subject, whose existence it 
therefore presupposes, just as the work of a statuary 
presupposes the existence of the marble. I say of 



156 IT HAS NO EXISTENCE BUT 

course, for this field of relationship between man and 
man, being intensely subjective, that is, free, sponta- 
neous, inorganic, living, never falls by any chance 
within sense, like the relations of the animal, but ex- 
clusively within consciousness. It is the whole virtue 
and efficacy of sense to antagonize one thing with 
another, to concentrate and inflame points of dis- 
cord and difference between things. And if men 
accordingly were not endowed with a deeper life 
than that of sense, namely, consciousness : or the 
faculty of discerning the free or subjective unity 
which exists among them, in spite of their super- 
ficial or obvious and outward personal disjunction : 
they w T ould always have remained the inveterate 
animals they were aboriginally born, nor ever have 
dreamt consequently of the infinite possibilities which 
had been squandered in their own ineffectual hu- 
man form. 

Understand then, dear friend, that human nature 
has no existence in se, but is invariably the attri- 
bute of a conscious subject, whose existence is pre- 
supposed by it. It is almost superfluous to say 
that this natural subject must be an exclusively 
conscious subject, because human nature has two 
constitutive and extremely different elements, a finite 
and an infinite one, or a creator and creature, and 
these two can coexist only in the integral unity of 



AS THE ATTRIBUTE OF A SUBJECT. 157 

consciousness. But this much cannot be too em- 
phatically said, namely : the natural subject cannot be 
a mere personal subject, cannot be what we are apt 
to call a mere individual subject, because in that 
case he would practically exclude the race-element. 
You yourself know quite as well as I do, that your 
own and my style of personal subjectivity is much 
too finite to do any sort of justice to the generic 
quality of our manhood, or what especially stamps it 
natural: our personalities are so far from doing our 
nature justice in fact, that they leave it, in our own 
spiritual estimation at least, an every way futile, 
petty, egotistic, ignominious thing. And what is 
spiritually true of our natural subjectivities is true 
no doubt of all the world's. Accordingly, the only 
adequate exponent of human nature must be able to 
interiorate his object to himself, and not, like us, 
merely exteriorate it. He must be a man broad 
enough in other words to embrace his nature, and 
spiritually reproduce it in his own subjectivity. In 
short, he must be both universal and individual, 
both generic and specific, both natural and spiritual, 
or comprehend within his own undefined and equa- 
torial personality, both poles of the nature he claims 
to make his own — infinite and finite, Divine and 
human : or else incontinently avouch himself an un- 
worthy exponent and illustration of the nature. 



158 HUMANITY NOT A MATERIAL FACT, 

But I must bring this long letter to a close. It 
is evident then from what has gone before, that — 
pace Messrs. Darwin and Spencer — man's natural 
genesis is not at all physical, but on the contrary 
strictly metaphysical, involving as it does his trans- 
formation or development out of a selfish being into 
a social one. For humanity is not a material fact 
discernible to the outward eye ; it is a spiritual 
truth, discernible solely to the inward eye, an eye 
rendered clear by love. It is a society, not a herd 
of men, and claims a distinctly qualitative not a 
quantitative unity. On his animal side man is doubt- 
less physical enough, his origin connecting him not 
only with the animal tribes, but with the vegetable 
and mineral kingdoms as well. But when we speak 
of human nature, we speak of what logically be- 
longs to man alone, and therefore disconnects him 
with all lower existence. This metaphysical nature 
of ours involves physics as its necessary basis of 
manifestation, just as the house involves its founda- 
tion, the tree its bark, the gem its matrix. For 
the house which towers to heaven to lay permanent 
hold upon sun and air, descends first into the bowels 
of the earth to compel the damp and darkness of the 
latter sphere into its own higher vassalage. So pre- 
cisely our natural evolution, which serves as a matrix 
for our subsequent spiritual or individual conjunction 



BUT A SPIRITUAL TRUTH. 159 

with infinite goodness and troth, familiarizes us first 
with the death and hell latent in ourselves, latent 
in our finite or personal consciousness, in order to 
reduce them ever after to its eternal subserviency. 
Man's spiritual destiny is so sublime, it is so vivi- 
fied and empowered by the intimate Divine fellow- 
ship, as to call for this preliminary wealth of mineral, 
vegetable, and animal existence, in order to furnish 
him the alphabet of ^//"-knowledge, and in that 
knowledge the sure pledge and guarantee of his 
ultimate free or spiritual acknowledgment of God. 
A finite consciousness can only recognize good by 
the previous contrast, of evil, truth by the previous 
contrast of error ; so man by the experience of the 
wretched death-in-life wrapped up in his proper 
person, learns truly to know and heartily to aspire 
to the only real and true life. It is the only 
rational and satisfactory explanation of our moral 
experience to look upon physics as this necessary 
involution of our natural evolution : our moral ex- 
perience being given us only to signalize the tran- 
sition — only to bridge the interval, and make the 
passage practicable — between our finite organic or 
physical persons, and our undefined, inorganic, im- 
personal, metaphysic nature: which it does by re- 
leasing us from the bondage of animal instinct, and 
opening our interiors to spiritual Divine influx. 



160 HUMAN NATURE THE LIVING LINK 

Such I do not hesitate to say is the literally awful 
grandeur of human nature, as being the sole link or 
liaison between creator and creature, between the 
infinitude of God and the finiteness of man ! And 
such the so long inscrutable secret of its incompres- 
sibility into any merely organic or finite physical 
dimensions ! It involves — lodged or masked in our 
vicious, obdurate personalities — a fossil infinitude 
or chronic Divine element, and insists upon this ele- 
ment being fairly reckoned with or put into fluid 
diffusible form, before it will permit the least right- 
eous judgment of itself to be formulated. And there 
is no nature properly speaking but human nature. 
There is any amount of specific mineral, vegetable, 
and animal form, but there is no nature correspond- 
ing to it, because there is no universal mineral, vege- 
table, and animal substance except man, and his na- 
ture infinitely transcends their wants. His nature is 
not theirs, any more than their form is his. The former 
contingency is gainsaid by the circumstance that his 
nature is a universal one while theirs is partial ; and 
the latter by the circumstance that their form is spe- 
cific or gregarious, while his is strictly individual. 
Every man claims to be estimated by himself alone, 
every animal by its species. Thus there is a univer- 
sal human substance called selfhood, not a material 
substance, not an organic substance, but a strictly 



BETWEEN GOD AND MAN. 161 

immaterial or inorganic one confined to consciousness, 
and hence incapable of scientific scrutiny. And hu- 
man nature consequently is alone entitled to the des- 
ignation of Nature, and to absorb in itself, as so 
many subject provinces merely, mineral, vegetable, 
and animal existence. I do not in the least mean to 
deny of course that besides this generic difference 
which I exhibit to all lower existence, and which 
puts an eternal gulf between us, I also exhibit many 
specific resemblances to it : being innocent with the 
dove, subtle with the serpent, gentle, with the lamb, 
fierce with the tiger; and so forth. These are not 
generic traits of humanity, but only and at most spe- 
cific traits, characterizing us not as Jiomines, but as 
viri : not as we stand substantially knit together, all 
and each, each and all, in one immortal bond of 
unity called society, but only as we stand superficially 
differenced each from every other in our petty selves, 
and so become distributed by an adorable providential 
wisdom into two great classes of men — respectively 
celestial and infernal — in which the finiting or spe- 
cific principle, the principle of endless variation and 
conflict, and the infiniting or generic principle, the 
principle of permanent unity and peace, are severally 
represented or embodied, and held in enforced mu- 
tual equilibrium. 

The adorable use of this arrangement in the Divine 



162 OUR SELFHOOD INEXPLICABLE WITHOUT 



economy above adverted to, is our natural or race- 
development. For the race of man, or human nature, 
is not the least numerically or materially constituted, 
is not, as we are apt to conceive it, the mere un- 
couth lumping or hideous agglomeration of our acrid, 
frivolous, and uncompromising selves. It is on the 
contrary altogether qualitatively or spiritually consti- 
tuted, being an exquisite Divine distillation of our 
foul and perishable natural selfhood, and a subse- 
quent sublimation or rectification of it into an ineffa- 
ble unitary form and order called society. For obvi- 
ously if selfhood be the mere adventitious base out 
of which human nature or the race-consciousness of 
man becomes divinely fashioned, it can have no show 
of pretension to enter into the finished superstructure 
itself, save at most as coloring matter, or perpetually 
vanishing reminiscence. 

Thus there is no way open to us philosophically 
of accounting for selfhood in the human bosom, save 
upon the postulate of its being the mask of an infinite 
spiritual substance now imprisoned, but eventually to be 
set free, in our nature : a substance whose proper 
energy consists in its incessantly going out of itself, 
or communicating itself to what is not itself, to what 
indeed is infinitely alien and repugnant to itself, and 
dwelling there infinitely and eternally as in its very 
self. That is to say, the Divine being or substance 



THE CREATOR'S NATURAL INCARNATION. 103 

is Love, love without any the least set-off or limita- 
tion of self-love, infinite or creative love in short ; and 
it communicates itself to the creature accordingly in 
no voluntary or finite but in purely spontaneous or 
infinite measure, in a way so to speak of overwhelm- 
ing passion : so that we practically encounter no 
limit to our faculty of appropriating it, but on the 
contrary sensibly and exquisitely feel it to be our 
own indisputable being, feel it to be in fact our in- 
most, most vital and inseparable self, and unhesitat- 
ingly call it me and mine, you and yours, cleaving 
to it as inmost bone of our bone, and veritable flesh 
of our flesh, and incontinently renouncing all things 
for it. 



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LETTER XIV. 




Y DEAR FRIEND : — We have seen that 
the sphere of human nature is the rela- 
tive or associated sphere of human life, 
the sphere of men's free, spontaneous 
fellowship, each with all and all with each, in con- 
tradistinction to that of their felt or personal abso- 
luteness, which is the sphere of their voluntary, 
interested, selfish disjunction of each with every other : 
so that society is of necessity the Divinely unitary 
form of human nature. 

But now what is the bearing of the definition 
of human nature I gave in my last letter, upon the 
doctrine of creation regarded as the regeneration of 
that nature? Why, as I conceive, it most clearly 
brings out the purely spiritual character of creation ; 
brings it out indeed with an emphasis sufficient to 
arrest and exalt even the simplest intelligence. If 
human nature, as we have seen, possess neither moral 
nor physical quality, save by implication, that is, be 



PERSONALITY THE TRUE GROUND OF UNBELIEF. 165 

neither person nor thing: if on the contrary it be 
nothing else than a most powerful but invisible Di- 
vine bond of relationship between man individual and 
man universal ; a bond moreover so free and elastic 
as safely to permit the appropriation of a private 
selfhood to man, and the subsequent expansion of 
that selfhood even to diabolic proportions : then the 
only philosophic obstacle to the recognition of crea- 
tion as a living or spiritual work of God disappears. 
That is to say : the only philosophic hindrance to 
men's believing in God as a creator, is their ina- 
bility to believe in themselves as created. Self-con- 
sciousness, the sentiment of personality, the feeling 
I have of life in myself, absolute and underived 
from any other save in a natural way, is so subtly 
and powerfully atheistic, that no matter how loyally 
I may be taught to insist upon creation as a mere 
traditional or legendary fact, I never feel inclined 
personally to believe in it, save as the fruit of some 
profound intellectual humiliation, or hopeless inward 
vexation of spirit. My inward afflatus from this 
cause is so great, I am conscious of such super- 
abounding personal life, that I am satisfied, for my 
own part at least, that my sense of selfhood must 
in some subtle exquisite way find itself wounded to 
death — find itself become death in fact, the only 
death I am capable of believing in — before any 



166 NATURAL INCARNATION THE ONLY 

genuine spiritual resuscitation is at all practicable 
for me. 

I don't say, mind, that church authority is not 
sufficient to make us ritually acknowledge, or ac- 
knowledge with the lips, creation in space and time. 
But creation in space and time is intellectually 
absurd or preposterous, and this is all that our 
ritual acknowledgments are good for in the long 
run, to make some absurd or incredible thing toler- 
able to us. We are talking here of a very differ- 
ent creation, that is, of the living or spiritual crea- 
tion ; and what I say is that the sole effectual 
hindrance to our acknowledgment of this is the 
unhappy conviction to which we are ecclesiastically 
born and bred, of our natural realism, of our being 
by nature veritable existences. Remember what 
spiritual creation involves. It involves the giving 
things phenomenal existence as well as, or in order 
to, real being; natural substance as well as, or in 
order to, spiritual form. In other words, the creator 
of men is their maker also. He not only gives his 
creatures soul, or spiritual life, which forever indi- 
vidualizes them from all other things, but He alone 
it is who out of His own spiritual substance gives 
them body as well, that is, natural existence, which 
forever identifies them with all other things. He 
does this, because He, himself, constitutes the true 



METHOD OF SPIRITUAL CREATION. 167 

and quasi-vital mother-substance of things, or fur- 
nishes, Himself, the natural material out of which 
thev are fashioned. This is the adorable difference 
of creative to created art. No artist or inventor 
amongst us ever finds the mother-substance or ma- 
terial of his work exclusively within himself, or 
supplied by his own spiritual resources. He finds 
it already provided to his hand by nature, and all 
he has to do consequently is to apply ordinary skill 
and judgment to the manipulation of this material, 
in order that his work may duly appear. So that 
unless the artist or inventor had first some natural 
community with these lower or artificial things he 
makes — his statue, his poem, his picture, his clock, 
his house, his steam-engine, his what-not, and were 
himself, to begin with, the fruit of a most spiritual 
Divine art, even as these lower things are a fruit 
of his own natural art, he would never be able to 
conceive them even, let alone execute them. Now 
the creator of man has, to begin with, no such com- 
munity of nature with his creature as this. He is 
not a subject of being, but its unalterable source, 
nor is He capable of naturally or subjectively exist- 
ing save in his creature. All natural or subjec- 
tive existence derives from Him accordingly, being 
nothing else but that instinctive and unconscious 
appropriation and imprisonment of His most holy 



168 NATURAL INCARNATION THE ONLY 

substance, which is involved in our spiritual con- 
sciousness, and is necessary to constitute it. And 
what we call " the universe of nature," which to our 
unspiritual imaginations is the outward sum or ob- 
jective truth of such existence, is merely an artifice 
of our innocent puerile intelligence to hide from our 
own eyes our dense ignorance of the fact, and so 
maintain a good conceit of ourselves. 

Besides, all physical existence that we know of is 
plainly specific : how therefore should we ever feel 
ourselves authorized to infer that there was some 
unknown universal substance that constituted the 
invisible generic unity, or source, of all these in- 
numerable visible species ? And by what magic 
above all were we ever taught to divine that the 
only proper name to bestow upon this universal 
substance was the indefinite term: Nature? There 
is no universal mineral, nor vegetable, nor animal 
substance, genus, or nature answering to any of 
these specific mineral, vegetable, or animal forms 
our eyes are familiar with ; and there is even express 
provision made in the moral law, as we shall see bye 
and bye, that no moral subject especially shall ever 
suggest the possibility of such universality. And yet 
men have always had this profoundly philosophic 
instinct of the underlying unity which binds together 
all the endlessly different and hostile forms of exist- 



METHOD OF SPIRITUAL CREATION. 169 

ence that fall within the compass of sense ; and have 
moreover always characterized it by this profoundly 
philosophic because purely undefined and prophetic 
designation — Nature, Whence then this marvellous 
intellectual instinct ? And whence this equally mar- 
vellous and just expression of it ? 

Simply from the infinite craving which the creator 
of man has for the spiritual sympathy and fellowship 
of His creatures ; they themselves being both alike 
a providential impulsion within the unconscious soul 
of the creature to bring about that Divine end. For 
this end requires for its own fulfilment a preliminary 
process of purgation in the created nature : requires 
that all the forms of evil and falsity to which the 
created nature is subject, by reason of its inherent 
alienation from, or otherness to, the infinite creator, 
should first have been thoroughly eliminated or 
sloughed off. And it is evident that these abstract 
evils and falses cannot be sloughed off until they have 
been concentrated, or become concrete and actual in 
the personality, so to speak, of the created nature : 
that is, in the experience of the various persons who 
derive from the nature. The original sin of the 
creature — his irpojov yfrevSo? from which all his evils 
and falses flow — is that he feels himself to exist 
absolutely ; and this is a sin he may well be uncon- 
scious of, since the boundless love of his creator is at 



170 NATURAL INCARNATION THE ONLY 

the bottom of it. At least if God gave himself to his 
creature in a finite manner, there could be no danger 
of the sin being committed. But He gives himself to 
the creature without stint, in infinite measure ; and 
the creature cannot help feeling therefore that he is 
life in himself. So profoundly unconscious is he of 
falsifying the spiritual truth of things by this vicious 
estimate of himself, that here after six thousand years 
of experience scarcely any one has yet attained to 
right ideas upon the subject. Above all, the people 
who preserve the outward or formal revelation of the 
church's long fatuity in regard to it, and bestow upon 
that revelation the most abundant honor, are the most 
densely and devoutly blind to its spiritual signifi- 
cance : and one would sooner expect a true acknowl- 
edgment of God from the stones in the street than 
from them. 

But though man starts with this feeling of his own 
absoluteness, or of his being life in himself, he is by 
no means left without a divine witness in his own 
bosom to the profound untruth of the feeling. For 
he feels, at the same time that he feels his existence, 
that there is nothing in himself to warrant or justify 
such existence. Let him start then never so gayly in 
the career of existence, he nevertheless starts with 
a threatening bombshell in his very vitals, which is 
ready to explode and lay him waste every moment 



METHOD OF SPIRITUAL CREATION. 171 

that he remains unreconciled to the essential truth of 
things ; or, what is the same thing, unenlightened as 
to the essential emptiness, imbecility, and charlatanry 
he carries about with him under the name of selfhood. 
Now the only possible way of his becoming recon- 
ciled to the absolute truth of things is, to give over 
this fallacious feeling of his constituting his own life 
or substance, of his constituting even his own exist- 
ence or selfhood, inasmuch as this fallacious feeling 
itself is a sheer effect of spiritual causes, all of which 
have their being in God most High, and are contin- 
gent upon His vast designs of mercy towards the 
race. And in order that his reconciliation may be 
complete or perfect, the nature or quality of the being 
which all spiritual existence has in God most High, 
becomes reflected to his experience by a law he finds 
within his bosom called conscience, the whole drift, 
spirit, or purport of which is that he love his neigh- 
bor as himself. For only in this way, namely : by his 
coming to learn, and his agreeing to act upon, the 
maxim, that the being which alone vitalizes his exist- 
ence is spiritual, not material, and that its nature is 
Love: is the portentous bombshell which he bears 
about in himself rendered gradually, and at last per- 
fectly, inexplosive and harmless. 

Now manifestly the inward or spiritual disciplin- 
ing of the creature to this divine height, demands in 



172 



NATURAL INCARNATION THE ONLY 



order to base it, in order to illustrate and enforce it, 
some answering outward or natural experience on his 
part; demands in fact the literal verification of his 
own nature. The essential freedom and rationality 
which he has in God utterly disqualify him in the 
long run for receiving truth on authority, and so ren- 
der it imperative that all nutriment intended for his 
spiritual growth be capable of scientific authentication 
— that is, of ultimating itself outwardly or to his 
senses — before he can assimilate it. In short his in- 
ward or spiritual creation and culture exact a strictly 
empirical, conscious, or phenomenal realm of existence 
on the creature's part, to endow him with true self- 
knowledge, that is, to correct the conceit and igno- 
rance and vanity that are incident to his private or 
finite generation, and so inoculate him in time with 
the chastening and otherwise unattainable knowl- 
edge and love of God. We may say then that God's 
creative purposes towards the human race necessarily 
involve a long preliminary wrestle or tussle on the 
part of the individual or self-conscious man with him- 
self : a long, toilsome, most bitter, and vexatious con- 
flict on his part with his own puny, crooked, insincere 
and ineffectual ways : before he can attain to that 
steadfast peace in God, which shall eventually leave 
him profoundly disinterested, indifferent, and actively 
inert in his own behalf. 



METHOD OF SPIRITUAL CREATION. 173 

And now, my friend, I wish you to take most par- 
ticular notice : that this provisional, or ancillary and 
pedagogic sphere of human life — in which man is 
thus left to make his own acquaintance, and to be- 
come for a while apparently his own exclusive guardian 
and providence, with a view to his ultimate and inti- 
mate spiritual disenchantment with himself — is the 
tcorld of our actual historic consciousness, the world of 
our daily experience which subjects us to a fixed exist- 
ence in space and time. It may astonish you to find 
any definite philosophic rationale assigned to this 
crazy world of ours, as much as it did M. Jourdain 
in the play to learn that he had been talking prose 
all his life without knowing it; but that this and 
nothing else is its proper function, there can be no 
doubt. This most outward and lowest of all worlds, 
in which space and time have a fixed and not a fluid 
character as they have in the spiritual world, is neces- 
sary to the development and training of our finite con- 
sciousness ; and it is the gradual enlargement of this 
consciousness of ours out of the contemptible personal 
limitations in which it begins, into the largest social 
dimensions in which it ends, that constitutes the sole 
veritable stuff of human history. When that history 
has attained its apogee, accordingly, and not before, 
we may expect to begin the realization of our spiritual 
creation. But the reason of my asking you to take 



174 HISTORY NOTHING ELSE THAN A 

particular notice of the fact here stated, was that I 
might by means of your so doing the better impress 
upon you another truth, which is : that what we call 
human history is at bottom nothing else than a theatre of 
Divine revelation; the precise historic form which 
the revelation takes being a display of the Divine 
dealings in relation to human nature. The initial 
acts of the drama reveal God in a state of appar- 
ently complete prostration to the created nature, so 
passively subject to it, as to be blasphemed, humili- 
ated, and done to death in the daily chaos of its self- 
ish and malignant passions : so that the Divine name 
sinks at last into a mere formula of execration among 
men, while its inherent merciful quality is almost 
wholly forgotten. But the later scenes of the as- 
tounding drama, and its final denoument, show Him 
spontaneously rising again from the death and hell 
to which He has thus been consigned in the persons 
of the created nature, and exalting the nature itself 
— henceforth discharged of personal limitations, or 
made forever social and unitary — into the intimate 
fellowship of His own eternal being. 

The truth to which I here call your attention is of 
the gravest rational import. The professing Chris- 
tian church is too baldly avaricious in a material 
sense, and is moreover too instinct spiritually with 
rival personal ambitions, and rival sectarian emula- 



THEATRE OF DIVINE REVELATION. 175 

tions, to give any heed to it, or to any other broadly 
human question. And the thin scum of so-called 
liberal or radical religionists which it is continually 
throwing off, seem even more superficial than the 
church itself in their intellectual tendencies, for they 
apparently crave no deeper satisfaction to their pecul- 
iar religious perplexities than science deigns to min- 
ister. Above all, men of science — such of them 
especially as make their science into a vehicle and 
instrument of philosophizing — are apt quietly to 
ignore the truth of a spiritual creation. So I fore- 
warn you that you will not find yourself in a crowded 
company, if you consent to cultivate the truth. Per- 
haps, however, for the first time in your life, you will 
feel yourself able en revanche to breathe to the full 
compass of your freed intellectual lungs. But I beg 
of you, if you have any dealing with this truth of the 
rigidly apocalyptic character of the world in which we 
live, to deal with it in the most literal unsentimental 
manner. I mean exactly what I say. The whole use 
of the actual world is to mirror or reflect Divine reali- 
ties to us, as much so as the whole use of your look- 
ing-glass is to mirror or reflect your physical person to 
your own eye. And it mirrors or reflects these reali- 
ties to us in connection strictly with our own nature 
in contradistinction from our proper persons, which 
are only and at best a factitious and perishable seni- 



176 HISTORY NOTHING ELSE THAN A 

blance or phenomenon of the nature. So that the 
total spiritual or philosophic meaning of this revela- 
tion is to declare God a man in the completest sense 
of the word : not merely a spiritual or internal man, 
infinite in love and wisdom, but much more a natural 
man, experienced in all our appetites and passions, 
and able therefore to subjugate every densest hell of 
personality in our nature to the broadest human use. 
The machinery, spiritual and material, by which this 
great revelation becomes possible and effectual, is ex- 
plained with great industry and iteration by Sweden- 
borg, in all his books more or less. But I confess 
I have been content to abide in the full spiritual light 
of the revelation itself, without taking an undue or 
pedantic interest in the comparatively dull and tedious 
recital he gives of the methods of its evolution. 

Cease then to conceive of our physical and moral 
existence as directly implicated either in our spiritual 
Divine creation or our natural Divine redemption. 
They are only indirectly implicated therein as furnish- 
ing us that secular and outside knowledge of the Di- 
vine ways which is necessary to base or induct our 
inward or spiritual recognition and appreciation of 
both one and the other. Our spiritual creation and 
our natural redemption are, both alike, a purely Di- 
vine and miraculous work, transacted within the un- 
conscious depths of our nature; so that neither our 



THEATRE OF DIVINE REVELATION. 177 

physical existence nor our moral history reflects the 
least original light upon them, their only active func- 
tion being servilely to symbolize them to our intelli- 
gence. How absurd then to expect any new light 
from the physical sciences, now so much cultivated, 
upon the questions of human origin and human des- 
tiny ! Neither the physical nor the moral world con- 
stitutes the true sphere of our life or being, but only 
of our factitious seeming or appearance ; and the more 
satisfied we are with the knowledge they impart to 
us, the more hopelessly remote are we from spiritual 
insight or perception. This phenomenal world in 
which we live is the world not of Divine reality, but 
of Divine revelation ; and he whose knowledge of it 
is greatest vindicates his superiority to his brethren 
only in boasting a larger familiarity with shadows. 
I am surprised that a person of your intellectual pith 
should be so easily duped by the airs of our scientific 
scepticism. Do you think it fair to deny the Divine 
being and existence, because science can discover no 
trace of them throughout the wide realm of physics ? 
If so, it can only be because you are speculatively 
blind to any higher realm of being than that of 
physics. At all events your need to believe in God 
is vastly less sensitive than mine, for my part I 
should unfeignedly thank science for its negative dis- 
covery, simply because it brought the Divine exist- 



178 SPIRITUAL VALUE OF MIRACLE 

ence nearer to my own nature, or approximately 
humanized Him. I confess I should have an invol- 
untary or inveterate shrinking from science, if it found 
any direct attestation of God in mineral, vegetable, or 
animal existence, much more any unmistakable traces 
of His habitat in the mechanism of the celestial spaces. 
For I should find it hard to persuade myself that a 
being who had any direct sympathy with either of 
those low and servile fields of existence could be pos- 
sessed of any intimate human quality. 

All this will remind you of the intellectual value 
I attribute to miracle in the evolution of our race- 
history. For in the absence of it, there would have 
been nothing to suggest or authenticate to the univer- 
sal heart and mind of the race the infinite and ador- 
able name of God, nor consequently any power to 
resist the incessant scientific debasement of our indi- 
vidual intelligence to mere nature-worship at most. 
For miracle is only a brute affirmation or attestation 
of the creative infinitude to men's brute or undevel- 
oped spiritual intelligence, and has been full there- 
fore of the tenderest and most timely Divine pity. 
That we happen to have outgrown its need at this 
day, and can intellectually dispense with it, has been 
owing to no diminution of the creative benignity, but 
rather to a practical enlargement of its scope, in wid- 
ening the sphere of man's freedom and rationality to 



AS A SCIENTIFIC IRRITANT. 179 

such an extent, as effectually to deliver him hence- 
forth from the dominion of great names, or of routine 
and authority, in scientific as well as in spiritual or 
sacred things, and thus make him over at long last to 
the inspiration of the unimpeded Divine Good in the 
form of our own glorified flesh and bones. We may 
say in fact that without miracles as a perpetual re- 
minder of a supersensuous life in us, the intellect 
must have lost its highest Divine charm which is 
that of freedom, or inward inspiration, and have in- 
continently succumbed to the limitations of science 
which forever enchain it to sense. Every intellect the 
least spiritualized is now free to assert its just insub- 
ordination to the senses, or claim to be wholly un- 
inspired by science. And I maintain that it owes this 
freedom solely to the long respect entertained among 
men for miracle as a distinctively Divine mode of 
action. For without miracle to serve as a symbol 
of the otherwise unrecognized creative infinitude to 
us until such time as the intellect itself should re- 
volt from the worthless symbol in the interest of its 
own living Divine substance, men would never have 
dreamt of ascribing a present reality to creation, but 
have been content to regard it as a past, or outward 
historic fact merely, intrinsically incapable therefore of 
arousing any deeper intellectual homage in us than 
that of our servile and dead memory. 



LETTER XV. 




T DEAR FRIEND: — We have dwelt 
long enough on general principles: it is 
time we begin to make some particular 
application of them. 
We have seen in recent letters that human nature 
is not the least physical, but on the contrary strictly 
metaphysical, involving physics simply as its organic 
or material base, in order to fix it, or give it anchor- 
age. And you, yourself, doubtless, will be as prompt 
as I am to infer hereupon, that we men — in whom 
this organic or finite base of existence almost com- 
pletely controls its distinctly natural and infinite 
possibilities — have small claim to be considered in 
our own right apt specimens of human nature. Thus 
far, in fact, I think we may be said to furnish only 
good negative specimens of it; that is, to furnish 
much better evidence of what the nature is not, than 
of what it is. We constitute hardly anything more 
as yet than the underground phenomenal basement 



HUMAN NATURE vs. THE HUMAN PEESON. 181 

floor of the majestic human house God is uprearing 
in our nature — a basement floor dug deep in min- 
eral, vegetable, and animal substance — and he would 
sadly err, accordingly, who should look upon us as 
the celestial superstructure itself. And being but 
this material base of our nature, we have no more 
pretension of course to constitute its living or spirit- 
ual personality, than the metals which enter into the 
material structure of a watch have to constitute the 
functional power so named. I have already shown 
you, indeed, that human nature — being bipolar, 
having two factors, one creative or infinite, the other 
created or finite — involves a hopeless contradiction, 
an inextricable puzzle, for every one born subject to 
it, and can only be integrally constituted therefore 
in a perfectly unitary personality, or one which shall 
do exact and equal justice to both of its extreme 
factors. In short, human nature is normally con- 
stituted only in the person of God-Man. 

Thus if Jesus Christ had never actually lived, the 
necessities of our thought would have driven us to 
invent him. At the same time I don't wonder that 
so many people at this day, who seem to me more 
or less tinctured with his spirit, are grievously per- 
plexed to connect that spirit with the aims lent by 
professing Christians to the Christian name. The 
Christian spirit, as represented by those who make 



182 THE CHURCH, THE MAIN CITADEL 

a formal or visible profession of it, is at most and 
altogether a personal spirit. It may have incident- 
ally, to be sure, more or less benignant issues to 
human life associated with it, but these issues are 
purely incidental : the main or direct tendency of this 
pseudo-Christian spirit is to deepen the sense of per- 
sonality in men, and modify it in the way of rendering 
it more and more consonant with the Divine will. 
The theory of the church seems to be that God's pur- 
pose in creation is : not, all simply, to form a heaven 
out of the human race, and make history infallibly 
conduce to that supreme end in becoming ever more 
and more a grand school of discipline for humanity, 
in which men, taught by a profound experience of 
the evils of self-love and love of the world, may at 
last become naturally or spontaneously roused to react 
against these evils, and freely incline instead to the 
promotion and culture of a race-sentiment in hu- 
manity, which has no practical admixture of evil and 
falsity in it to betray and defeat their devotion : but 
to form both a heaven and a hell out of the human 
race, leaving it strictly optional with every indi- 
vidual to determine himself to either of these oppo- 
site poles, but allowing him no chance, when once 
his choice is made, of ever after correcting it. The 
revolting hideousness of ascribing such a purpose 
to the merciful Creator of helpless, dependent men, 



OF EXISTING EVIL AND FALSITY. 183 

you are as quick to discern as I am, and I need 
not dwell upon it. But I want you clearly to under- 
stand that these diabolic audacities and blasphemies 
which men theoretically allow themselves with refer- 
ence to the Divine name, essentially inhere in our in- 
sane habit of regarding human life as personally 
and not as socially constituted, and attest the neces- 
sarily perverse interpretation which that insane habit 
leads us to impose upon every form of Divine truth. 

Dear friend, if men could but once livingly swing 
free of these personal implications in their thoughts 
and aspirations towards God : that is to say, if they 
could, even for a moment, spiritually feel themselves 
as no longer visible or cognizable to God in their 
atomic individualities, but only as so many social 
units, each embracing and enveloping all in affec- 
tion and thought : the work would be forever done, 
as it seems to me. Heaven would be begun on 
earth, and the very nature of man reflect or repro- 
duce at last the lineaments of Divine good. But 
what hope of this is there within the precincts of 
the Church at all events, w r here men are expressly 
taught that the only imaginable theory of Christ's 
office is to save men in their individual persons, 
or their piddling private capacities, and not at all 
as a nature or race; and consequently that their 
only chance of salvation at his hands lies in their 



184 CLAIM OF A PERSONAL INTEREST 

diligently and impudently * " appropriating " him, 
every one to his worthless and insignificant little self. 
As if Christ could be in any sense a personal pos- 
session of men, to be made theirs by some cheap 
and odious methodistic mouthing of his name, and 
afterwards to be paraded as an ornament on their 
sleeve to dazzle the eyes of harmless worldlings 
who still have modesty and grace enough left 
thoroughly to disown him! If these thoughtless 
Christian sectaries of ours could once be led to sus- 
pect that " our Lord," as they vulgarly call him, is 
the veritable and only great God almighty himself 
in men's natural lineaments — the spiritual father 
therefore of all mankind, especially of those who in 
their own conceit are hopelessly remote from Him, 
I wonder whether the discovery would arouse them 
at last to a sense of spiritual awe and reverence, or 
whether all spiritual possibilities are not effectively 
drowned out for them under this rubbish of ritual 
righteousness with which they affect to be clad. The 
inmost life and sanity of my own faith in God de- 
pend upon my feeling myself incapable of any per- 
sonal or outside relation to Him, because the bare 
thought of such a relation as possible between us 
is the menace of death to my soul. And this is the 
reason why I cling with even a passionate intellect- 
ual gratitude to the revelation of the Divine name 



IN CHRIST PREPOSTEROUS. 185 

in Jesus Christ, because he alone in history shows 
me the Divine infinitude or perfection actually blent 
or identified, in his dying and risen person, with 
human nature — my own nature as man — and so 
forever disenthralls me to my own consciousness 
from the pungent damnation wrapped up in my own 
odious and imbecile selfhood. 

Swedenborg's books throw a flood of light upon 
the method of this ineffable Divine achievement in 
our history, and you are so blessedly free of ecclesi- 
astical biases that I see no reason why you should 
not read them with a profit and pleasure equal to my 
own. There may be some reason, unknown to me, 
blinding you to the honest intellectual charm of the 
books; perhaps, like many others, you have been 
prejudiced against them by the obvious fact that they 
have been hitherto engineered, not in the interest 
of mankind, but exclusively in that of a low sectarian 
ambition, or lust of ecclesiastical self-righteousness. 
But surely after the many lessons the Christian eccle- 
siasticisms have taught us, of the inevitable deprava- 
tion Christ's spirit is bound to undergo whenever the 
attempt is made to reproduce it in corporate form, 
you would not hold the upright old Swedenborg him- 
self answerable for this helpless betrayal of Ids truth 
on the part of his professed followers, would you? 
If any obvious prejudice of this sort really threaten 



186 SWEDENBORG'S DOCTRINE OF THE 

to cut you off from the immense benefit Swedenborg's 
books bring to the intellect, let me briefly assure you 
that they themselves are infinitely remote from sug- 
gesting to an unperverted mind any of these shallow 
— and, as we may say at this day, profligate — ec- 
clesiastical conceptions. Swedenborg indeed of good 
set purpose finds very much to say of the church 
both " old " and " new," and he says it all without 
a shadow of reticence or apology, as if he never 
doubted that every one who came to his books would 
be thoroughly vastated of sectarian aspirations, and 
incapable therefore of supposing him such an ass as 
to represent God almighty solicitous only to establish 
under the name of "new" church a more baldly 
vicious and contemptible ecclesiasticism than any 
that had ever yet cursed the burdened and patient 
earth. What then is his general doctrine of the 
constitution of the church, as shadowed forth in 
sacred or symbolic history? 

This doctrine cannot be at all understood, unless 
we previously take into consideration the state of 
things in which it is grounded, namely: that the 
world in which the church exists, and for whose bene- 
fit it is a spiritual provision, is essentially a sphere 
of Divine revelation : while at the same time it is 
profoundly ignored by the world, or those who in- 
habit it, that it is charged with any such universal 



CONSTITUTION OF THE CHURCH. 187 

function. The world lias indeed no faintest suspicion 
of the truth, that it exists for nothing else but to 
constitute an orderly revelation of God's spiritual 
infinitude or perfection ; but stupidly settles down 
to the far more flattering conviction, that it consti- 
tutes on the contrary a most real and permanent 
Divine work, a work of true and finished creation, 
and this in spite of its being destitute of every spirit- 
ual Divine mark. Xow the church was intended to 
be a standing witness or memorial of God amidst 
this prevalent ignorance of men concerning Him. It 
is a candle irradiating by its feeble but honest glim- 
mer the otherwise unmixed and hopeless darkness. 
Swedenborg accordingly views the church throughout 
its entire history in the light of a Divine drama, pre? 
figuring to the reflective understanding of men — who 
are inwardly callous to the most tender and spiritual 
Divine substance latent in their own coarse souls and 
bodies, and outwardly therefore unobservant of it — 
in certain symbolic or representative persons and peo- 
ples, the entire and signally miraculous truth upon the 
subject of mans Divine nature and destiny. About 
the prehistoric beginnings of the church indeed he 
is naturally able to give us very little information, 
since the greatest amount of such information could 
only conduce to the satisfaction of a purely idle 
curiosity. But he shows that it grew out of a very 



188 STATEMENTS IN REGARD 

tender and infantile spiritual intelligence in man, 
scarce weaned as yet from Nature's maternal bosom ; 
and that this intelligence accordingly was wholly 
made up of a perception of the interior correspond- 
ence that obtains between spirit and nature, that is, 
between celestial goods and their derivative terrestrial 
truths. That the peculiar quality of this intelligence, 
however, was very exalted, being inspired by the 
heart, appears from all he specifically says of it, 
and especially from a brief but pregnant incidental 
glimpse he gives of its broadly human genius and 
sympathies, in a remark he makes about the church 
called Adam, with which our sacred or symbolic 
scripture opens, and of which he saw the spiritual 
or heavenly state. He says : " Those who belonged 
to the most ancient church, designated by the name 
of Man or Adam, are above the head in the Maxi- 
mus Homo, and dwell together in the utmost happi- 
ness. They told me that it is seldom others come 
to them, except such occasionally as come, not from 
this earth but, as they phrased it, from the universe."* 
The men of this church in fact " were internal men, 
delighted only with internal things," which are the 
things of Love and Wisdom, " and viewing external 
things only with their eyes, while they reflected upon 
the spiritual goods and truths they represented. Thus 

* Arcana Cades Ha, 1115. 



TO THE PREHISTORIC CHURCH. 189 

external things were held of no intellectual account 
by them, save as leading them to reflect on internal 
things, and these in their turn to reflect on celestial 
things, and these again on the Lord, who to them 
was all in all." * 

It is very difficult, I admit, to do any justice with 
our inspissated spiritual faculty to Swedenborg's de- 
scriptions of this early or internal development of the 
church in man. They suggest to our coarser intel- 
lectual fibre a very much feebler grasp upon life than 
our own, and it even disconcerts us to imagine the 
truth otherwise. To the cultivated or regenerate 
heart, however, this intellectual judgment of ours, no 
doubt, seems very profane or sensuous ; very much 
as, to the common heart, a judgment which should 
affirm the superior sweetness of the adult man to the 
infant child would appear little short of sacrilegious. 
Anyhow the state of things here described was very 
incongruous with the Divine designs in humanity, 
for man then, as Swedenborg says, was more like 
a spirit than a man, and the Divine design could 
be fulfilled only by making him flesh. " For in this 
way only could celestial and spiritual life be adjoined 
to man s proper nature *, that they might be as one." f 

Swedenborg accordingly proceeds to represent the 

* Arcana Ceelestia, 54. 
f Ibid. 160. 



190 INNOCENCE OF A NATURAL 

descendants of the church, thus styled Adam or Man, 
as inclining to selfhood: that is, desiring to become 
instead of an internal man an external one. But 
he does not fail to characterize this change of genius 
in it, though relatively unfortunate of course, since 
everything deteriorates in proportion as it becomes 
remote from its source, yet as by no means absolutely 
so; inasmuch as selfhood, though regarded in itself 
or absolutely it is unmixed evil, is yet the indis- 
pensable condition of man's natural development, or 
race-evolution, and consequently of that redemptive 
achievement in our nature which constitutes God's 
true or eternal spiritual glory in creation. This 
rising inclination to selfhood is the inevitable dawn 
of the natural or race-mind in us, and as such of 
course is noway evil, though viewed apart from that 
subordination it is the fountain of all the evil known 
to the universe. We don't get angry with the infant, 
although we feel bound in the interests of his own 
maturity to correct him, when we see him instinc- 
tively exhibiting the traits of his future natural man- 
hood; on the contrary we are secretly diverted by 
his arch and graceful ways of self-assertion, because 
as yet they are full of innocence or innocuous. Ex- 
actly so we may say there is no ground for moral 
disapprobation in these nascent or unconscious ego- 
tistic inclinations on the part of the early church, 



INCLINATION TO SELFHOOD. 191 

because to the wiser mind they simply foretell the 
advent in the fulness of time of the Divine natural 
humanity, and are themselves meanwhile full of in- 
fantile ignorance and innocence. 

Indeed Swedenborg always draws a wide dis- 
tinction between the natural love of self and the 
world, and an absolute or unnatural love of them, that 
is, a love of them for their own sakes ; calling the 
former a wise love, and the latter a stupid or insane 
one. He says for example in his profoundly clear and 
beautiful Essay upon the Divine Love and Wisdom, 
of which Lippincott published an extremely good 
translation by Mr. Foster eight or ten years ago, and 
which, if you are interested in what I say, I recom- 
mend you to get : "The loves of self and of the world 
are by creation heavenly loves, because they are loves 
of the natural man subservient to spiritual loves, in 
the same way that foundations are subservient to 
houses. These natural loves guarantee a man's wish- 
ing well to his own body, desiring food, raiment, and 
shelter, consulting the welfare of his family, seeking 
after useful occupation, and even after honors pro- 
portionate to the worth of the public trusts he fulfils, 
and the extent of the fulfilment he renders them; 
and guarantee moreover his enjoying worldly pleas- 
ures, and finding delight and refreshment in them : 
but now mind ! our natural loves guarantee all these 



192 UNHANDSOME PRE-NATAL 

things, not at all for any absolute or unconditional 
worth to be found in them, for there is no such 
worth, but for a certain end of use which they pro- 
mote in rendering a man fit to serve the Lord and 
serve the neighbor. But where this use is not pro- 
moted, as in the case of a man who has no relish for 
serving the Lord or his neighbor, but only for serving 
himself by means of the world, then his natural self- 
love ceases to be heavenly and becomes infernal, be- 
cause it cuts the man off from delighting in his 
nature or kind, and shuts him up, spiritually, to his 
own selfhood, which is wholly evil." * 

Swedenborg goes on to give his readers a detailed 
mention of the specific churches that succeeded to 
this Adamic one, with the several characteristics 
that made each of them noticeably distinct from 
its predecessors. These details are excessively te- 
dious and uninteresting at this day, though to future 
inquirers into our distinctively race - genesis they 
may prove perhaps exhilarating ; and I have not 
the least intention of dwelling upon them. They 
were churches still in the gristle, unclad as yet with 
natural flesh and bone, and devoid therefore of proper 
historic interest, so far at least as indicating any con- 
structive providential purpose in human nature ; be- 
ing based every one of them upon some mere diver- 

* Divine Love and Wisdom. See also Ath. Creed. 43. 



DEVELOPMENTS OF THE CHURCH. 193 

gent relation in the personal genius of its founders 
with respect to every other that preceded it, and des- 
tined like them to be engulfed in some more general 
form which should round them all off into visible 
unity. I suppose it is all very exact church-physi- 
ology, but I confess I feel little or no interest in the 
very unhandsome pre-natal physiological development 
of the church, while it was still an immature and un- 
born providential embryo in the earth, peopling it too 
with every uncouth, unclean, and monstrous form of 
life below the human. And even after it has attained 
to fully formed consciousness of itself as man, and 
separates itself from whatsoever is not-man, it awak- 
ens no philosophic interest save as it tends, by uncon- 
scious copulation with the world, to generate what 
men subsequently recognize as human nature. Ac- 
cordingly I shall only attempt to give you a con- 
densed philosophic apergu of the ever-growing corrup- 
tion of the early churches, until that corruption finally 
culminated, or became a momentous historic phenom- 
enon, in the gross fanatical lineaments of the Jewish 
theocracy : certainly from a spiritual point of view the 
most complete and comprehensive embodiment of un- 
godliness ever Divinely consecrated in human annals. 
But the only result of this philosophic glimpse will 
be, I hope, to suggest afresh to your mind what an 
adorable wonder-worker we have in Him who thus 



194 CREATION ESSENTIALLY MIRACULOUS. 

utilizes, or turns to the advantage of human nature, 
the inmost and most implacable evil of its individ- 
ual bosoms, making it indeed the fertile womb of 
infinite and otherwise inconceivable Divine and hu- 
man good. 



LETTER XVI, 




T DEAR FRIEND : — To say as Sweden- 
borg says : that this early church called 
Adam or man inclined to selfhood, or from 
internal tended to become external : is mani- 
festly equivalent to saying that it lost sight of the only 
reason it had for existing, namely : the service it might 
do the world in keeping it mindful of God : and began 
to value itself on its own account, as if it had existed 
ab origine for its own sake, and were itself an absolute 
Divine good in the earth. 

The original bias to evil in the human heart, or 
what separates it from God, is constituted by self- 
love and love of the world. But these loves are 
not in themselves evil, but innocent and heavenly, 
because they are purely instinctive or organic loves 
in man serviceable to spiritual loves, just as foun- 
dations are serviceable to houses. "Eor from these 
loves," say Swedenborg, "man wishes well to his 
body, desires to be fed, clad, lodged, to consult 



196 OUR SELFISH AND WORLDLY LOVES MADE EVIL 



the comfort of his family, to seek after useful em- 
ployment, yes, to be honored for the worth of the 
services he thus renders to society, and also to be 
delighted and recreated by the pleasures of the 
world : but all these for a certain spiritual end, 
which ought to be use, for by these loves thus ex- 
ercised and refreshed he is fitted to serve the Lord 
and the neighbor. But when these loves refuse to 
become subservient to more universal loves, as Di- 
vine and neighborly love, they then become infer- 
nal, because they then immerse a man's mind and 
soul in selfhood, which in itself is all evil."* 
In course of time then these wholesome imper- 
sonal loves are sure to lose their innocence or be- 
come personal by being made to minister to self- 
hood in man, or promote the interests of his falla- 
cious individuality as against those of his common 
nature. In other words all men in time become 
selfish and worldly, that is, unduly addicted to the 
love of themselves and the love of the world. This 
natural degeneracy of mankind is not fatal by any 
means, but it calls aloud for God's redemptive 
power in human nature to save the race from pre- 
mature blight. Neither selfishness nor worldliness 
will ever be considered obsolete forms of human 
nature, but they will always be considered more 

* Arcana Ccelestia, 396. See also Ath. Creed, 43. 



BY THE INFLUENCE OF PROPRIUM. 197 

and more disreputable or unworthy forms of it. 
They will always drive men of spiritual culture to 
desire to realize their nature in social or Divinely- 
redeemed form, but they will never have power 
actually to deprive any one of hope towards God. 
As long indeed as animals and vegetables continue 
to exist man will scarcely be robbed of his God- 
ward faith and hope by any amount of selfishness 
or worldliness, for the animal is a very innocent 
and unconscious type of the former love, and the 
vegetable of the latter. Until God sends an utter 
blight upon the life of the animal and vegetable 
kingdoms therefore we shall feel no misgivings 
about His intimate dealings with our own nature. 
What is worldliness at bottom? We all know well 
enough what it is in a literal or moral aspect — as 
separating between man and man ; for we all love 
the world too much, and sometimes sacrifice our 
neighbor's esteem, and our own peace of mind, to 
its tempting pleasures, honors, or emoluments. But 
what does worldliness mean in a spiritual rather 
than a moral aspect, that is, as separating no longer 
between man and man, but between man and God ? 
It means to esteem and love the world as a final- 
ity, to be satisfied with it as a fulfilment of our 
hopes and aspirations towards God : thus it means 
at bottom to ignore God, to ignore His spiritual 



198 THE EXCESS OF THEM EVEN NOT HATEFUL TO GOD, 

perfection, or His essential infinity and eternity, and 
acknowledge Him at the most as a physical and 
moral power, the creator and maker of this realm 
of finite personal existence. When the worldling 
acknowledges God at all, this is the extreme limit 
of the homage he renders Him: he considers Him 
as the author of the very pleasant life that now is, 
the giver of every good and perfect gift to his 
senses. To be sure there is nothing very exhilar- 
ating to the Divine mind in this degree of homage, 
provided it is anyway sincere, which is extremely 
problematical at least: but just as surely there can 
be nothing revolting in it, nor even displeasing, to 
that mind: so that if the creator had but destined 
His creature to remain an innocent animal merely, 
without any capacity of spiritual life or enjoyment, 
He would, I dare say, have been highly satisfied 
with it. 

Selfishness to be sure is a much more potent, 
stubborn, and profound evil than worldliness, and 
far more hostile practically to human society or 
fellowship ; and Swedenborg in order to show the 
superior malignity of the former love to the latter 
as an element of human life, characterizes the hells 
which grow out of it as diabolic, whereas he always 
gives the hells of worldliness the milder designation 
of Satanic. But selfishness, although a less super- 



BECAUSE HE UTILIZES IT IN THE HELLS. 199 

ficial evil than worldliness, accommodates itself in 
some sort equally well to the Divine administration 
in human affairs : as is shown by what Sweden- 
borg says of the hells to which it is ministerial. 
The devil and Satan would be very discreditable 
products of the creative love, provided they owed 
their original existence to it. But they do not in 
the slightest degree. Satan and the devil (by 
which terms respectively of course one would be 
understood to mean not any individual existences 
but the whole mass of human kind in whom either 
the love of the world or the love of self character- 
istically predominates) owe their origin to a vital 
misconception they are both alike under in regard 
to human freedom, deeming it absolute instead of 
moral, contingent, relative. This misconception on 
their part is very unfortunate no doubt, because, as 
it leads to all manner of practical injustice and un- 
truth, it requires them to be separated from the 
orderly mass of their brethren, and shut up for a 
long while in work-houses where they are com- 
pelled under pain of forfeiting their daily bread, 
and of even worse punishments, to work, and re- 
frain from bad manners. But they are never in the 
slightest degree objects of God's contempt, let alone 
abhorrence, but equally with heavenly existences at- 
tract His unswerving mercy or compassion. 



200 THE ONLY INTOLERABLE EVIL TO GOD IS 

And thus you are prepared for what I have next 
got to say. It is a very intelligible proposition in 
itself, but it may perhaps encounter some prejudice 
in your understanding. The proposition is this : 
that while we owe our milder or moral evils, those, 
namely, which separate us outwardly from our fel- 
low-man, to the inspiration of the world-spirit, the 
spirit which reigns in every man by virtue of his 
natural birth, the inspiring cause of our deeper 
spiritual evils, those which separate us inwardly 
from God, our life-source, and call for our natural 
redemption at His hands, is exclusively the church- 
spirit in humanity, the spirit that leads every man 
that has it to think himself nearer to God than 
other men. 

This proposition, I repeat, may meet with a slow 
reception at your hands. Let me then above all 
things make sure that you perfectly understand 
what I mean by it. 

What I call the deeper spiritual evils which 
attach to men, separating them from their crea- 
tive source, are those of confirmed selfhood or self- 
righteousness. Do I mean you to understand me, 
then, as saying that the church-spirit in humanity is 
the source of all our spiritual unrighteousness ? This 
is literally what I mean to say, and what I would be 
understood as saying : that the church-spirit is par 



PROPRIOf, SELFHOOD, OR SELF-RIGHTEOUSNESS. 201 

excellence the evil-spirit in humanity, source of all 
its profo under and irremediable woes. Don't, I beg 
of you, interpret me to your own thought as saying 
that the church stimulates any of man's actual or 
moral evils. I say no such stupid thing. For it is 
notorious that the church studiously fosters the sen- 
timent of moral worth or dignity in its disciples, 
the sentiment of distinction or difference between 
them and other men. It is only by so doing in- 
deed that she fixes or hardens them in that ten- 
dency to jproprium or selfhood to which they are 
naturally inclined, and thus delivers them over bound 
hand and foot to spiritual pride, pride of character, 
in short a s^-righteous spirit, which is the only 
form of evil, the only form of sin or blasphemy, 
fundamentally at variance with man's spiritual ex- 
istence. But this latter evil is undeniablv a church 
development in our nature. The church is the ac- 
tual parent or protagonist of all the spiritual evil 
latent or possible in human nature — evil of self- 
hood or self-righteousness ; and by focusing it in 
her own haughty personality gives God at length his 
opportunity — in allowing the church to become the 
mere mendicant and impotent existence it now is in 
the earth — to crush out in every spiritual high- 
place, or most recondite corner of human nature 
itself, the otherwise inaccessible and flagitious evil 



202 FOR THIS IS SPIRITUAL OR LIVING EVIL; 

which it represents. God has no power to combat 
spiritual evil, save as it ultimates itself in natural 
or outward form. And the church pretension in 
humanity is the ultimate natural or outward form 
of all man's spiritual profligacy. For human nature 
has no existence in se, and comes to light only 
through men's consciousness : not their individual or 
private consciousness, but their associated or public 
one : and the church and the world are as vet the 
only recognized forms of this latter consciousness. 

I mean then that the church-spirit in humanity 
is the expression of all man's patent or latent spir- 
itual evil, and reduces his mere moral evil to com- 
parative insignificance, for the latter is curable, and 
the former not. However selfish or worldly a man 
may be, these are good honest natural evils, and 
you have only to apply a motive sufficiently stimu- 
lating in either case and you will induce the sub- 
ject to forbear them. Bat spiritual evil is inward 
evil exclusively, pertaining to the selfhood of the 
man, or livingly appropriated by him as his own, 
and cannot therefore become known to him save in 
the form of an outward natural representation ; for it 
is not like moral evil mere oppugnancy to good, 
but it is the actual and deadly profanation of good, 
or the lavish acknowledgment of it with a view of 
subordinating it to personal, or selfish and worldly, 



AND FATAL, IF ALLOWED, TO THE HUMAN RACE. 203 

ends. It is the only truly formidable evil known 
to God's providence, being that of ^^"-righteousness, 
and hence the only evil which essentially threatens 
to undermine the foundations of God's throne. It 
is that evil of unconscious hypocrisy or making 
believe which alone Christ is represented in the 
New Testament as having spiritually stigmatized to 
men's eternal abhorrence, and which Swedenborg 
says he was able to overcome only by subjugating 
the influence of all the heavens and all the hells to 
his own spotless love of mankind, so utterly elim- 
inating from our nature or history in its Godward 
relations the vicious and thoroughly damnable ele- 
ment of privacy or prqprium — that is, of private or 
personal pretension among men, of individual char- 
acter, or finite independent selfhood. 

This all seems plain enough, but now you will 
ask me : How the church comes to be representa- 
tively identified with this capital evil of selfhood 
or self-righteousness in man. 

I will answer your question in as few words as 
possible, though I am not without a fear that they 
will not be so few as I could wish. But I will at 
all events do my best, in the limited space that the 
plan of these letters allows me, to make the point 
clear. God knows that I have not the least idea 
of making my answer acceptable to you, except 



204 THE CHURCH ALONE PRODUCES 

through your own goodness of heart, or love of 
mankind. What I want to do then is to convince 
you that the church is alone chargeable with the 
production of actual prqprium, character, differential 
selfhood, among men ; and that in so doing it has 
representatively brought to a head the fundamental 
evil of the created nature, that which spiritually 
vivifies all its other evils moral and physical : so 
that absolutely nothing remains between us and the 
full fruition of God's spiritual kingdom on earth, 
but the hearty recognition of the visible church as 
once a living but now an entirely fossil representa- 
tive element of human nature. 

To begin then : Suppose for a moment that self- 
ishness and worldliness were our only vices. Sup- 
pose that man and the world alone existed to men's 
senses and intelligence, just as they do to the senses 
and intelligence of the animals ; and that the influ- 
ence of these things was entirely uncomplicated by 
any influence derived from the church as an insti- 
tution. It is easy enough to see that selfishness 
and worldliness in this hypothetical state of things 
would be no vices at all, but simple instincts of 
men's natural life leading them to the fullest pos- 
sible enjoyment of the goods about them, and be- 
getting in them meanwhile of course the utmost 
possible indifference to God and their neighbor : 



THIS DESPERATE EVIL IN MEN. 205 

but there stopping. For these things are vices only 
as they tend to selfhood, or lead us into practical 
conflict with our spiritual destiny ; only as they tend 
to interest us supremely in a lower order of life 
than that which our nature fits us to enjoy : and 
palpably in the case supposed these spiritual limita- 
tions would be wholly lacking. It is to the church 
primarily that the world is indebted for its every 
gleam of spiritual knowledge ; and without the 
church therefore the world would never have learned 
to condemn either selfishness or worldliness. A man 
here and there by obeying a greedy or covetous 
spirit might paralyze the life of his senses, or bring 
practical ruin upon his organization ; but however 
unfortunate his particular excesses might prove him, 
he never by any possibility could deem them either 
sinful, as reflecting a certain inward or spiritual tur- 
pitude on himself, or even evil, as reflecting a cer- 
tain outward or moral opprobrium upon his conduct. 
So far indeed from anything of this sort being pos- 
sible to the man, we have only got to invest him 
with a capacity of reflection in order to see that 
he would necessarily under the circumstances deem 
his selfishness and worldliness, or his lust and cov- 
etousness, his highest law or duty. 

But in point of fact a man of that simple spirit- 
less make could have no capacity of reflection, and 



206 CONSCIENCE THE EVIDENCE OF AN INFINITE 

consequently no conscience of law or duty. Con- 
science presupposes in all its subjects a personal 
development, or sense of selfhood, as its necessary 
ground ; and personality in every case is a result- 
ant of two forces, a conventionally good and evil 
one, belonging to the unconscious nature of the 
subject, and yet so exquisitely adjusted to each 
other, or so evenly balanced, as to make him feel 
without the least misgiving that he is absolutely a 
free and rational individuality, the essential arbiter 
of his own actions. In short the existence of con- 
science in men presupposes the existence of the 
church and the world as extreme representative fac- 
tors of human nature, while the perfect equilibrium 
or mutual adjustment of these factors in their prac- 
tical operation upon the subject argues a really Di- 
vine or infinite purpose and providence in humanity. 
You see then that it would be the height of ab- 
surdity to attribute to a man whose very nature is 
representatively expressed by the church and the 
world anything short of a highly composite genesis. 
It is thus exclusively the alliance of the church 
and the world in our nature that stamps it human, 
and so gives men their original consciousness of 
evil being, in being either selfish or worldly. And 
it is specifically the influence of the church in 
our nature that brings about this result. It is 



AND A FINITE STRUGGLE IN OUR NATURE. 207 

a grand providential work for the church to do, for 
it would never have got into the mind of man that 
to live for self and the world was not the highest 
ideal of human life, the supreme law of human 
destiny, unless the church had put it there. And 
since human history is only a conflict between the 
claims of our private selfhood and the claims of 
our Divine-natural manhood upon our allegiance, 
we may say that the church in stigmatizing selfish- 
ness and worldliness to men's opinion, laid the 
foundation stone of human history. 

But now do you not see at a glance that the 
practical effect of the church's initiative in this 
matter could only be to originate a broad division 
of men into two classes : one good, as painfully ab- 
staining from selfish and worldly lusts, the other 
evil, as freely indulging them ? The church, so far 
forth as it is a visible institution in the earth, and 
claims a Divine warrant corporately to exist and 
function, looks upon all men without exception as 
naturally bound to the pursuit of happiness. For 
bare existence is a happiness to man, stimulating 
as it does every variety of passional desire and ac- 
tivity in his bosom, and by a necessary instinct he 
seeks to promote, enlarge, and intensify this happi- 
ness. Now the church authoritatively bids the man 
pause in this enticing career, saying to him that 



208 



THE CHUECH A MERE RUDIMENTARY 



happiness is not the supreme law of his activity, at 
all events is not its first law ; that he is first of 
all a creature of God, gifted with freedom and in- 
telligence, and bound therefore to acquaint himself 
with his creator's will, in order to see that his pri- 
vate pursuit of happiness involve him in no prac- 
tical contrariety with that will. The man either 
listens, or does not listen. If he listens, he forth- 
with enrolls himself in the church ranks, and sepa- 
rates himself from a world conventionally supposed 
to be lying in wickedness. If he does not listen to 
the church's testimony, but rejects it as against him- 
self, he identifies himself with the profane world, and 
cuts himself off from the church's blessing. 

Hence, as I say, the inevitable division of man- 
kind into two classes, a good and an evil class, or 
a sacred and a profane class, the one professing to 
observe the Divine will, or what is reputed to be 
such in all things, the other following its own will 
supremely, without making any profession one way 
or the other. Now however necessary and provi- 
dential a work this may have been on the part of 
the church to effect, let me remark first of all that 
it was an exceedingly rude work at the very least; 
a very unskilful carrying out of the Divine design. 
Undoubtedly the Divine design in giving the church 
a visible institution was to establish a witness of 




EXPONENT OF CONSCIENCE. 209 

Himself in the earth of men's carnal memory, which 
might always serve to base and authenticate their 
interior or spiritual apprehensions of Him as a power 
actively latent in human nature and human affairs. 
But it was, to say the very least, an exceedingly 
rude and crude memorial of the Divine name, to 
identify it not with the spiritual revelation exclu- 
sively of that name or quality, but with the literal 
and objective discrimination of certain perfectly petty 
and squalid persons into a celestial and infernal 
class, the one full of righteous or just hope in God's 
favor, the other consigned to righteous despair. 

I say " at the very least." But the work which 
this early church thus did in the earth was very 
much worse than coarse and unskilful. It spiritually 
falsified the sacred name it was intended to keep 
the world in remembrance of; and it has assidu- 
ously perpetuated the falsification — through its long 
and dreary sequela of lineally descended churches — 
even down to the present day. For the distinction 
of men into good and evil, however fundamental a 
datum it be to our natural intelligence, does not 
really or spiritually exist to the Divine mind save 
in accommodation to the needs of that most nascent 
and infirm intelligence. That is to say : it is no 
absolute distinction, as the church holds, character- 
izing men spiritually or as they exist in themselves, 



210 CHANGE OF PLAN. 



but only as they stand differentially related by their 
phenomenal action to a great objective work of right- 
eousness to be accomplished by God in the fulness 
of time in human nature itself: by which all men, 
notwithstanding their relative or subjective differ- 
ences in regard to it, will be brought into complete 
formal or objective harmony with the Divine will. 

— But as I dimly foresaw, my friend, I shall be 
obliged to interrupt my writing here that I may 
try to impress you anew with the extreme intel- 
lectual importance of rightly conceiving the work I 
am endeavoring to elucidate in this place : a work 
of spiritual creation, purporting to be wrought by God 
within the precincts, by no means of men's phenom- 
enal personality, but of their common substance or 
nature. This is onr one theme, and we must per- 
petually bear it in mind under all our discussion 
of incidental topics. I have undoubtedly been re- 
miss in not sufficiently enforcing this necessity upon 
you. And I am persuaded that I cannot do better 
now, awkward and tardy proceeding though it be, 
than to interpose an intercalary letter or two just 
here, denning what I mean by spiritual creation 
much more fully than I have hitherto done : leaving 
the interrupted thread of my discourse in regard to 
church history to be resumed afterwards. 



T HI IU-JL 



•n iv u u k r 



■ »« jW '" i 




LETTER XVII. 




Y DEAR FRIEND r— A spiritual or liv- 
| ing creation, which consists in giving its 
creature life or being, must of necessity 
on the part of the creator confess itself a 
purely subjective or miraculous one, attesting at most 
His indwelling infinitude in the created nature. 
" From the uncreate, infinite Being itself and Life 
itself," says Swedenborg, "no being can be imme- 
diately created, because the Divine is one and indi- 
visible. But from created and finite substances, so 
formed that the Divine may be in them, beings may 
be created. Since men and angels are such beings, 
they are only recipients of life; wherefore if any 
suffers himself to be so far misled as to think that he 
is not a recipient of life but life itself, nothing can 
hinder him thinking himself a God." * Again : " Di- 
vine Love cannot create any one immediately from 
itself, for in that case the creature would be love in 



* Divine Love and Wisdom, 4. 



212 LAWS OF THE 



its essence, or the Lord himself; but it can create 
beings from substances so formed as to be capable 
of receiving its love and wisdom. Comparatively as 
the mundane sun is unable by all its heat and light 
to make the earth germinate, when nevertheless it 
can produce germination from earthy substances," 
such as seeds, " in which it may be present by its 
heat and light, causing vegetation." * So he says 
elsewhere, to the same effect : " Life viewed in itself, 
which is God, cannot create another being that shall 
be life itself: for the life which is God is uncreate, 
continuous, and indivisible; hence it is that God is 
one. But the life which is God can create, out of 
substances which are not life, forms in which it can 
exist, giving these forms to seem as if they themselves 
lived. Now men are such forms, which as being 
only receptacles of life, could not in the first creation, 
or originally, be anything but images and likenesses 
of God : for life and its recipients adapt themselves 
each to the other like active and passive, but in no 
wise mix together. Hence human forms, being but 
recipient forms of life, do not live from themselves but 
from God who alone is life." f " It seems to man 
as if he lived from himself, but this is a fallacy. The 
reason why it seems as if life were in man is, that it 
enters by influx from the Lord into his inmost forms, 

* Divine Love and Wisdom, 5. f Ath. Creed, 25. 



SPIRITUAL CREATION. 213 

which are remote from the sight of his thought, and so 
are unperceived. Further, the principal cause which 
is life, and the instrumental cause which is recipient 
of it, act together as one cause and this action is felt 
in the latter, or in Man, as if it were, in himself. 
Still another reason why life appears to be in man 
himself, is that the Divine love is of such an infinite 
quality that it desires to communicate to man " (or 
have in common with him) " what belongs to itself." * 
As is said in another place : " It is the essence of 
love not to love itself but others, and to be joined 
in unity with them by love. It is also essential to 
it to be beloved by those others, since thereby conjunc- 
tion is effected. The essence of all love consists in 
conjunction : yea the life of it, what we call its en- 
joyment, pleasantness, delight, sweetness, beatitude, 
happiness, felicity. Love consists in willing what is 
our own to be another's, and feeling that others pri- 
vate delight as our own. This it is to love. But for a 
man to feel his own delight in another, and not the 
other's delight in himself, — this is not to love ; for 
in this case he loves himself, but in the other his 
neighbor. These two loves, self-love and neighborly 
love, are diametrical opposites ; for in proportion as 
any one loves another from self-love, he afterwards 
hates him. Hence it is evident that the Divine love 

* Ath. Creed, 26. 



214 SPIRITUAL CREATION INERT WITHOUT 

cannot help being and existing in other beings and 
existences whom it loves and by whom it is beloved. 
For when such a quality exists in all love, it is bound 
to exist in the amplest measure, that is, infinitely or 
without drawback, in Love itself." * And Sweden- 
borg goes on to say, that if infinite love existed in 
others, by creation, they would be Love itself, and 
God consequently would be self-love, whereof not 
the least conceivable fibre is possible to Him, being 
totally opposed to His being. " This reciprocation of 
love must take place between God and other beings 
in whose selfhood there is nothing of the Divine. " 
This objective middle-ground however, which all 
spiritual creation implies between creature and crea- 
tor, and makes common to them both, is objective 
only to the creature's imperfect intelligence, while it 
is in truth a necessary element of his subjectivity, 
being requisite to define the spiritual creation to his 
limited perception, or give it anchorage and embodi- 
ment to his experience. It no way enters as such 
objective middle-ground into the creative idea, but 
confesses itself a mere latent, still unrecognized, con- 
stitutional factor or law of the created subjectivity. 
Thus in the actual creation nature is the objective 
middle-ground between creature and creator ; the 

* Divine Love and Wisdom, 47, 48, 49. 



THE CREATURE'S NATURAL CONSTITUTION. 215 

mother-substance which to the created intelligence 
gives creation sensible background, or is necessary to 
constitute it, and make it visible. But this natural 
mother-substance has no independent existence to the 
creative intelligence ; but exists only as an implication 
or involution of the created or finite selfhood, to which 
fallacious quantity it affords all the while the only real 
or universal and ^<m-spiritual pretext and justifica- 
tion, and hence in every way invites and secures to it 
self the tenderest Divine concession or accommodation. 
Nature indeed offers to the universal heart of man 
the nearest possible symbol — that is, pledge or reali- 
zation — of the Divine infinitude it is any way capa- 
ble of acknowledging ; and it is freely worn therefore 
by God as a temporary mask or visor, under cover 
of which He pursues, and finally legitimates to the 
created intelligence, His stupendous spiritual ends. 

It is plain to see, then, that creation, in the only 
sense in which it is capable of being rationally 
apprehended, that is, as a purely spiritual or living 
work, is bound by virtue of the creator's infinitude to 
determine itself to objective natural form ; or, to use a 
compact and convenient expression of Swedenborg, is 
bound to ultimate itself naturally or objectively to the 
creature's experience, in order to reflect or reproduce 
to his finite consciousness the infinite life or being he 
has in God. " By creation is meant," says Sweden- 



216 SPIRITUAL CREATION INERT WITHOUT 

borg, " what is Divine from inmost to outermost, or 
first to last. Everything which proceeds from the 
Divine begins from Himself, and progresses accord- 
ing to order even to the ultimate end : thus through 
the heavens into the world, and there rests as in its 
ultimate " or home; " for the ultimate of Divine order 
is in the nature of the world. What is of such 
a quality is properly said to be created." * So, in 
another place, he says : " Scientific things " — by 
which he means, well-established facts as disengaged 
from the personal or superstitious fancies of men — 
" which belong to the sphere of man's natural intel- 
ligence, are the ultimates of order there ; and things 
prior, that is, spiritual things, must be in ultimates 
that they may exist and appear in the natural sphere. 
All prior or spiritual things, moreover, tend to ulti- 
mates as to their own boundaries or limits, and exist 
in those boundaries or limits as causes in their effects, 
or as superior things exist in inferior, as in their 
proper vehicles or vessels. Hence it is that the 
spiritual world terminates in man's natural mind, in 
which mind accordingly the things of the spiritual 
world are exhibited representatively" as in a glass, 
or picture. " Unless spiritual things " — which, re- 
member, are always living affections of goodness and 

* Arcana Ccelestia, 10634. See also Ath. Creed, 29. 



THE CREATURE'S NATURAL CONSTITUTION. 217 

truth — " were representatively reproduced by such 
things as are in the world, they would not be at all 
rationally apprehended. " * 

" Divine order never stops in a middle-point (as the 
angel or heaven) and there forms a thing without its 
ultimate, for then it would not be in a full and 
perfect state; but goes straight on to its ultimate, 
and when it is in its ultimate, it then forms, and also 
by mediums there brought together, it redintegrates 
itself and produces ulterior things by procreations : 
whence the ultimate is called the seminary or seed- 
place of heaven." f " The ultimate of Divine order 
is in man, and because he is the ultimate of Divine 
order, he is also its basis and foundation. Heaven 
without the human race would be like a house want- 
ing its foundation." { "The end of creation, which 
is that all things may return to the creator, and that 
conjunction may be effected, exists in its ultimates." § 
" That all ultimate ends become anew first ends, is 
evident from the fact that there is nothing so inert 
and dead but has some efficiency in it; even sand 
exhales somewhat which contributes assistance in 
producing and therefore in effecting something." || 
" The ultimate, when order is perfect, is holy above 

* Arc. Cal. 5373. § Divine Love and Wisdom, 171. 
f Heaven and Bell, 315. || Ibid, 172. 

* Ibid., 304. 



218 IMPLICATION OF NATURE IN CREATION 

interior things, for the holiness of interior things is 
there complete." * 

It is this implication of the created nature, accord- 
ingly, in the spiritual creation, which alone gives 
that creation its truly miraculous quality, and saves 
it from being what otherwise it must always have 
appeared to be, a mere magical product, or work of 
enchantment. Magic is the power of gratuitous or 
ostentatious productivity ; the power to produce some- 
thing out of nothing, consequently without labor- 
pains : thus a something which has no inward ground 
of being, and therefore exists surreptitiously or by 
virtue of a deception practised upon the senses of 
those who acknowledge it. It is a power which used 
to flourish, in very high places too, upon the earth ; 
but is happily now confined to the hells, save in so 
far as the hells themselves are vainly trying to com- 
pass an unsuspected lodgment in the human mind in 
the guise of an absurd doctrine called Spiritualism. 
But the power of all the hells put together would be 
impotent at this day to persuade any man of average 
spiritual intelligence that magic, however specious 
its performances, is anything but a gross mockery of 
creative power, or ever succeeds in demonstrating 
anything but its own unlikeness to it. It is the 
characteristic of power truly creative to be able to 

* Arcana Ccelestia, 9824. See also 5077, 9360, 9212, 9216. 



GIVES IT ALL ITS INTEREST TO THE HEART. 219 

endow its creature with a miraculous mother-sub- 
stance, or natural basis, and by that means reproduce 
as in a glass all its own spiritual effects, so verifying 
or authenticating them to the creature's understanding. 
And it is the unfailing attribute of natural existence 
to be a form of use to something higher than itself, 
thus the mineral to the vegetable, the vegetable to 
the animal, and the animal to man ; so that whatso- 
ever has not either potentially or actually this soul 
of use within it, does not honestly belong to nature, 
but confesses itself a mere sensational effect produced 
upon the individual intelligence.* 

* " Hence," says Swedenborg, " you may discern how sensually — 
that is, from the inspiration of the bodily senses, and the darkness 
which they cast over spiritual things — they think who deem that na- 
ture is self-originated. These men think from the eye and not from 
the understanding. People of this sort are able to think nothing of what 
being and existing is in itself, namely : that it is eternal, uncreate, and 
infinite. Nor are they able to think of Life in itself, but as of some 
volatile thing, passing off into nothing; nor yet of Love and Wisdom, 
being totally incapable of discerning that all things of nature derive 
thence their existence. And indeed it cannot be seen by any one that 
all things of nature exist thence, unless nature herself be thought of as 
an orderly series of uses, and not estimated from some of her outward 
forms merely, which are only visual objects. For the uses of nature 
proceed only from life, and their series and order from wisdom and love. 
But her visible forms are mere continents of these uses, so that if they 
alone or primarily be regarded, nothing of life can be seen in nature, 
much less anything of love and wisdom, and consequently nothing of 
God." — Divine Love and Wisdom, 46. 



220 SPIRITUAL CREATION INTERPRETED 

Creative power in truth has at this day no fitter 
expression than that which is furnished it by the 
modern doctrine of Evolution : understood, to be sure, 
somewhat more largely than that doctrine is by its 
current scientific adherents. For to men of science 
generally the doctrine of evolution imports merely 
the development of one natural species or kind out 
of other pre-existing species or kinds ; whereas a true 
or philosophic doctrine of evolution implies the con- 
version of natural (or lower) substance into spiritual 
(or higher) form. There is no doubt that man, in 
so far as his very inferior animality is concerned, is a 
strict product of the animal kingdom: but there is 
therefore no reason to hold him to be an evolution 
of it, unless indeed evolution means devolution, or a 
process from more to less, from strength to weakness. 
He is, doubtless, so far forth as his animal nature is 
concerned, identical with all other animals, only less 
highly gifted than they with aggressive and persistent 
force ; and so far accordingly there is more ground 
to pronounce him an involution of the animal king- 
dom than an evolution of it. But man is not essen- 
tially animal. He is animal at most on his organic 
side, and it is only by remorselessly slumping his 
distinctively inorganic or human attributes in his 
animal or organic ones, that any pretext is found for 
making his existence a product of evolution from 



BY THE DOCTRINE OF EVOLUTION. 221 

lower forms. In so far as he is animal, he does not 
require any doctrine of evolution to explain his ad- 
vent unless it be one which explains at the same 
time the advent of the whole animal kingdom of 
which he forms a part. And so far as he is distinc- 
tively human and inorganic — that is, unembraced in 
the animal kingdom — his own particular animality 
stands between him and the rest of that kingdom, 
stamping itself the only ground or earth of involution 
he can possibly need, for the subsequent uses of his 
spiritual or characteristic evolution. 

My subjective existence, physical and moral, is in- 
volved in my spiritual being, just as the shell is 
involved in the oyster, the egg in the chicken, the 
husk in the wheat, the matrix in the gem, the parent 
in the child: that is, as giving it not substance but 
surface, not being but background, not centre but 
circumference, not inward reality but outward appari- 
tion, not soul but body. My subjective existence in 
short is the worthless, perishable ground of my im- 
mortal spiritual being. Thus involution is anything 
else than evolution. It is the direct logical opposite 
of Evolution. It is indeed a literal and strict inver- 
sion of it, just as the root of a plant is an inversion 
of its stem, or its seed an inversion of its fruit. In- 
volution is logically proportionate and precedent to 
Evolution, as earth is logically proportionate and pre- 



222 DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THE PHILOSOPHIC 

cedent to heaven ; and no hypothesis of evolution will 
ever be competent to furnish a pedigree of existence, 
unless it start from a previous philosophy of involu- 
tion. Thus if, as many self-constituted partisans of 
science are prone to believe, monkey evolves man, it 
can only be by virtue of man first involving monkey. 
And to account for man therefore on monkey prin- 
ciples, near or remote, without first accounting for 
monkey on distinctively human principles, would be 
to leave our poor ancestral monkey himself unac- 
counted for : that is, it would practically be to deify 
him. It would be to explain being by existence, the 
absolute by the contingent, substance by accident, 
church by steeple, ship by sails, house by cellar. 
Whatever is really involved in any existence is merely 
and at most constitutional to it, as conditioning its 
apparition, and is not the least essential to it, as con- 
ferring its being. My various viscera are no doubt 
a condition of my physical statics ; but that they in 
the least degree explain my moral dynamics, can only 
be affirmed as it seems to me by wilful fatuity. 
They are involved in my physical existence, which is 
itself involved in my moral consciousness ; so that 
you will never be able to account for them, until you 
first account for me, independently of them. 

For, per contra, whatsoever is evolved by any exist- 
ing form, is itself rigidly creative of such form ; that 



AND THE SCIENTIFIC IDEA OF IT. 223 

is, causes it to exist in natura rerum. So that to 
attempt explaining evolution by involution, man by 
monkey, is a palpable logical dodge or quibble, whose 
whole force consists in confounding two essentially dis- 
crepant and reciprocally inverse things, namely : crea- 
tion and constitution, being and existence, substance 
and surface, cause and condition, spirit and flesh. 
Involution is to evolution precisely what shell is to 
oyster, what husk is to wheat, what matrix is to gem, 
what parent is to child ; and to explain evolution by 
involution, therefore, is to make the oyster cradle its 
shell, the wheat nourish its husk, the gem protect 
its matrix, the child support its parent ; all w T hich to 
the eye of philosophy constitutes a downright witches' 
sabbath of science ; but a sabbath nevertheless which 
Mr. Herbert Spencer and the so-called positivists gen- 
erally are content and proud to sanctify. To think of 
our most eminent religiosi being frightened by these 
vagaries of our modern scientific thought ! What 
does their alarm prove ? Certainly little or nothing 
with respect to the object of it, but very much with 
respect to its subjects. For it proves not that Pos- 
itivism, or any subtler form of meditative Atheism, is 
any way dangerous to any properly human interest, 
but only that our existing religious faith is every way 
insecure, being founded not upon the rock of Truth, 
but upon the shifting sands of authorized opinion. 



224 EVOLUTION RELATIVELY A SPIRITUAL FLOWER; 

Thus, as I have said, evolution is an every way fit- 
ting doctrine wherewith to express the truth of spirit- 
ual creation, provided we give the phenomenal basis 
of involution which it claims a strictly subject posi- 
tion ; or make Evolution a regenerate spiritual flower, 
and Involution its natural earthly stem. This is pre- 
cisely what the scientific men fail to do. They invari- 
ably put the cart before the horse, in making the stem 
account for the flower, and not the flower for the stem, 
which is the true philosophic ; order. They make the 
earth explain heaven, and 'not heaven the earth, the 
body explain the soul, and not the soul the body, 
physics explain morals, and not morals physics, and 
thus practically outrage all the deeper and finer 
instincts of humanity, dogmatically sundering that 
exquisite thread of tradition which in the absence of 
positive knowledge has hitherto bound men in intel- 
lectual and ^<m-spiritual unity. The obvious phil- 
osophic objection to recent scientific speculations is 
not that they practically tend to invalidate the current 
religious dogmas in regard to creation, which they 
cannot do half forcibly enough ; but that they substi- 
tute in their place a scientific dogmatism which is not 
half so respectable in itself, to begin with, and which 
if it should ever become established in popular regard 
would be fatal to the very conception of creation, and 
hence to the spiritual dignity of human nature. 



INVOLUTION" ITS NATURAL STEM. 225 

Science has a notable function in the world, but as 
I have already said it is an intensely humble not a 
commanding one; an abjectly servile not a leading 
function. Its name is Esau, not Jacob, being born 
of the bond woman not of the free. That is to say, 
science reflects the heart still in bondage to the intel- 
lect, while philosophy alone expresses the intellect 
inspired by the heart. The function of science is to 
observe and connote the actual facts of existence, in 
order to determine the mental relation of unity which 
binds them all together ; not in the least to dogma- 
tize, or build up a philosophic credo, either upon the 
physical facts themselves, or the logical unity with 
which the mind invests them. In short, fact and the 
relations affirmed by the mind amongst facts, is the field 
of science. Thus it is scientifically competent to 
Newton to prove that the elliptical movement of the 
earth around the sun as demonstrated by Kepler, is 
due to the attraction exerted by the sun upon the 
earth. For what Newton thus does is simply to 
establish by Kepler's aid a hitherto unrecognized law 
of planetary life or intercourse. And it is perfectly 
competent moreover to Mr. Darwin, in the point of 
view of science, to collect and colligate, under any 
generic law of unity he pleases — say Natural Selec- 
tion, Sexual Selection, or both together — whatsoever 
actual facts of transmutation he may have observed in 



226 SCIENCE ESSENTIALLY MINISTERIAL, 

existing animal and vegetable species. For what he 
thus does is simply to establish and announce a cer- 
tain spiritual or living unity, with which the mind 
by an instinct of its own underlying infinitude, insists 
upon filling up all the crevices of nature, and account- 
ing for all its changes. Mr. Darwin may, to be sure, 
have been faithless to fact, or faithless to the mind : 
that is to say, his observation may be imperfect, or his 
generalization premature : but at all events his method 
is thus far irreproachable. But when any one, under 
cover of Mr. Darwin's name, quietly " slips over," as 
Aristotle says, "into another kind," and making a 
fulcrum of his induction in regard to the existing or 
fossil variations in the same species, applies his lever to 
the disclosure of the origination of species, he at once 
casts off the honest livery of science, and converts 
himself all unconsciously into an ambitious dogma- 
tist. Mr. Darwin makes it scientifically very proba- 
ble that natural and sexual selection account for all 
the varieties observable within our existing species. 
But to reason hereupon that these two principles are 
sufficient to account for the origin of existing species 
themselves, is not to reason scientifically, because the 
reasoning admits of absolutely no verification in fact. 
My tailor yields a sufficient scientific explanation of the 
differences between my clothes and those of other peo- 
ple ; but when you seek a philosophic justification of 



NOT MAGISTERIAL TO THE MIND. 227 

clothing itself, you must go beyond the tailor. It is 
good science to say : the sartorial art originated more 
or less all the varieties we observe in the costume of 
men ; certainly all those variations which simply im- 
ply advance : for here we have any amount of well- 
attested fact to sustain us. But it is complete recre- 
ancy to science to say hereupon " the sartorial art also 
originates clothing itself among men " : for here we 
have absolutely no historic fact to keep us in counte- 
nance. 

Just so with the scientific evolutionist. The basis 
of his speculation here is not fact at all, but pure 
fancy. He says in effect : " I conclude that natural 
and sexual selection have operated all the changes we 
observe within our extant species of existence, and be- 
tween some of these species again and certain allied 
species of which we have only a few fossil remainders ; 
because a great store of well-attested facts in natural 
history warrant this conclusion " ; and this is good 
science. But now he proceeds : " I take another step, 
and conclude, from the adequacy of these laws to ac- 
count for specific changes in existence, that they are 
adequate also to account for the origination, which is 
the creation of existence." And this is spurious sci- 
ence. Why ? Simply because it is obviously incapa- 
ble of verification by any fact of nature or of history, 
and depends for its justification upon a certain bias 



228 NATURE NEITHER BEGINS NOR ENDS ANYTHING. 

or prejudice of the man's own intellect, and upon this 
exclusively. 

Nature gives us absolutely no hint, much less any 
distinct affirmation, in respect either to the origin or 
destiny of any of her forms or species. All that we 
see in nature is a foreground of change upon a back- 
ground of stability, thus fixity in universals, mutation 
in particulars. But nothing originates and nothing 
ends in nature. Why ? Because nature is not being 
nor even existence, but only, and at most, appearance. 
Hence all of nature's forms or species are purely rela- 
tive or phenomenal ; that is to say, they presuppose 
an intelligence which is capable of comprehending 
them, and to which alone they exist. And the scien- 
tific evolutionist consequently, in so far forth as he 
invents a natural origin even for the larvae of our exist- 
ing marine ascidians, let alone for the mind of man 
itself, proceeds upon a total misunderstanding of what 
nature means, and so turns the actual truth of things 
upside down. In fact he discharges the mind of all 
freedom or life j for he makes nature no longer the 
obedient mirror of truth, but its absolute source and 
arbiter. 



LETTER XVIII 




Y DEAR FRIEND : — Let me say again, 
in simple justice to myself, that I have no 
shadow of objection to the new scientific 
dogma, in so far as it is purely negative; 
that is, bears upon the stagnant religious faiths of the 
world. Doubt or denial is the legitimate weapon of 
scientific advance. And our present science is, I appre- 
hend, only an indispensable John the Baptist blindly 
preparing the way, and proclaiming the advent, of a 
new, or a spiritual and living faith : which it does 
by vastating the active intellect of men of its dead 
faiths. Accordingly in so far as our recent bellicose 
science goes to discredit an historic or literal creation, 
I have no quarrel with it. Eor I see in it only the 
augury of a new faith, based upon a profounder ac- 
knowledgment of creation, as being no preposterous 
physical exploit of God accomplished in the realms of 
space and time, but a wholly spiritual operation of His 
power in the realms of human affection and thought. 



230 THE FORTE AND FOIBLE OF SCIENCE. 

Thus it is altogether in their positive aspect that I 
pretend to any quarrel with our recent scientific dog- 
matics. When science, disdaining the humble but 
honorable office of ministering to a new intellectual 
faith and a new spiritual life in man, assumes itself 
to constitute or even forecast such faith and life, she 
is no longer amiable nor respectable, and invites as 
it seems to me a just disclaimer on the part of the 
outraged common sense of mankind. 

The forte of science, be it always remembered, is 
reflection, or reasoned observation ; and these things 
are plainly possible to man only in so far as his feet 
are planted in a fixed physical or organic world exist- 
ing objectively or outwardly to his senses. Now 
reflection being the proper forte of science, or the 
mode of industry whereby she thrives, I hope it will 
be allowed me to ask what is her consequent foible, 
or the mode of activity by which she dwindles ? The 
foible of science, then, reflection being her forte, is 
perception, or spiritual insight; which is possible 
to man only in so far as his head dwells in a free, 
inorganic, ethereal, or metaphysical world existing 
inwardly or subjectively to his affections. Now, 
such being the forte, and such the foible, of science, 
it follows naturally enough to the eye of philosophy, 
that the punctum saliens both of her reflective strength 
and her perceptive weakness should be, as I have be- 



NATURE'S FIRST LESSON TO THE INTELLECT. 231 

fore alleged, a certain ontological illusion which she 
shares with the mass of uninstrueted men, in regard 
to the natural constitution of things : or all simply the 
constitution of nature. Accordingly let us look into 
this. 

We give the designation of Nature to the outlying 
universe, or world of things existing to sense. Now 
what is the earliest and deepest intellectual lesson 
we derive from this world of sense ? It is that every- 
thing embraced in it exists really in a composite man- 
ner, however much it may seem to exist in a simple 
or absolute one. The reason of this discrepancy be- 
tween the rational truth and the sensible fact of the 
case is, doubtless, the infirmity of the created intelli- 
gence : we the dependents of nature, who get our high- 
est knowledge exclusively from the gradual revelation 
she gives of the Divine goodness and truth, bring to 
her observation and study first of all a simple, and then 
a composite faculty of attention ; and she miraculously 
adjusts herself to our need. Thus we first apprehend 
nature by sense, and only afterwards learn to appre- 
hend it by the understanding. The exigency of our 
senses imposes upon everything that exists an appar- 
ently absolute, that is, a fixed or finite, quality, which 
the thing is thought to possess in itself, or quite irre- 
spectively of all other things. But our reason or 
understanding subsequently enables us to convert this 



232 DIFFERENCE BETWEEN PHYSICAL 

absolute or fixed quality of existence, which it appar- 
ently possesses in itself, into a relative, unfixed, or 
contingent quality which it possesses only in relation 
to other things. That is to say, we first apprehend 
the thing as a purely physical existence, and after- 
wards rise to the conception of it as a natural exist- 
ence. The first or sensuous aspect of the world pre- 
sents us everything in a purely selfish, personal, or 
phenomenal point of view ; the second or rational 
aspect of it alone exhibits everything as existing in a 
purely relative, or associated, and harmonious light. 
A horse, for example, happens at this moment to be 
tied before my door. This horse, I repeat, is an ab- 
solute or fixed fact of sense, entirely distinct from all 
other facts ; so fixed or absolute, that to dispute or 
deny it would be equivalent to disputing or denying 
the competence of my senses in their own sphere. 
But notwithstanding that the horse is this absolute 
or fixed fact to my senses, you yourself will agree with 
me that he has no existence to my reason out of re- 
lation to all other horses. That is to say : while he 
apparently exists in himself alone, or as an individual 
horse, he in very truth exists only in solidarity with 
his kind. And so with all other things in the realm 
of sense. 

Now what I want hereupon to point out to your 
attention in the first place, is a truth which perhaps 



AND NATURAL EXISTENCE. 233 

you never have thought of before, namely ; that this 
relative existence of things — the existence they have 
in relation to all other things — alone stamps them 
natural ; while their absolute or individual existence 
— the apparent existence they have in themselves — 
is a grossly fallacious or unreal thing, in total contra- 
diction to the constitution of nature. To be sure it 
is only a judgment of our infirm or imperfect sense 
that things have this absolute or fixed individuality. 
Nothing claims it but man ; but because he, inspired 
by sense and uncontrolled by reason, affects selfhood, 
he does not hesitate to bestow it also in modified form 
upon all other existence. All other things utterly dis- 
claim it in fact ; and it is only the profound halluci- 
nation which he cherishes in regard to himself as in- 
volving his own being and existence, that ever leads 
him to invest them also in their degree with selfhood, 
reckoning their innocent persons in fact good and 
evil, and subjecting them to reward and punishment, 
as they stand affected to his dubious and very wilful 
supremacy. 

I said just now that this absolute or individual 
aspect of things, the aspect they have of existing in 
themselves, and irrespectively of other things, was 
grossly unnatural : "in total contradiction to the 
constitution of nature." Nature, to our conception, 
is a composite existence made up of an objective and 



234 THE PHILOSOPHER HAS NO CALL 

subjective unity. That is to say, it is the strict unity 
in all its subjects of a public and a private, or a com- 
mon and a proper, force. It embraces two elements, 
one universal the other particular, one statical the 
other dynamical, one material, in short, the other 
spiritual ; and these two elements moreover are most 
distinctly one or united, so that however easily we 
may divorce them in thought or reflectively, they are 
never separable in fact. A really absolute, finite, or 
independent existence, save as a fallacy of the human 
mind, is disavowed by the nature of things, and we 
may safely dismiss it from rational regard therefore. 
There is no such existence out of our infirm under- 
standing, and no subjective pretension to it outside of 
hell, which fairly lives and grows fat upon the hallu- 
cinations bred of it. But I admit that nature out- 
wardly viewed does wear the appearance of being 
almost wholly made up of these absolute or finite 
and independent existences. But what business have 
we, as philosophers, to be caught looking at nature out- 
wardly ? This in fact is just my complaint in the 
premises, that we should be so long philosophically 
content to view nature as an outward thing, or as she 
stands revealed to sense, when she herself prays to be 
regarded inwardly alone, or as she reveals herself to 
our understanding : that is, to be regarded no more 
as mineral, vegetable, and animal, but as exclusively 



TO LOOK AT NATURE OUTWARDLY. 235 

human. It is only an inveterate sensuous fatuity on 
our part which leads us to mistake the mere sensible 
or physical appearances of things for their funda- 
mental natural or rational realities. And there is no 
way of correcting the mistake but by outgrowing this 
fatal intellectual fatuity ; that is, by at once manfully 
deposing sense from the governing or inspiring rela- 
tion it now bears to the intellect, and remanding it 
forthwith to a wholly ministerial or subordinate place. 
Believe me, my friend, it is nothing but this subtle 
and insinuating serpent of sense (rightly so named in 
sacred or symbolic writ) which — appealing to the 
woman in us, that is, the still latent or unrecognized 
spiritual Divine force in our nature — has ever had 
power so to falsify and otherwise bedevil our intelli- 
gence as to make us look upon creation as a material 
or sensibly objective work of God, detached from Him 
by the laws of space and time, instead of a purely 
spiritual or inwardly subjective one, intimately blent 
with His eternal Love and Wisdom through the laws 
of our own nature or the life of our affection and 
thought. It is simply this stultifying pressure of 
sense upon the intellect that has always until now 
rendered it intellectually impossible for us to identify 
our own honest natural manhood, let alone our Divine 
natural one. Have you not under the guidance of 
sense always looked upon your natural manhood as 



236 SCIENCE HAS NO PERCEPTION 

at bottom physically engendered? That is to say, 
as engendered out of the various limitations you de- 
rive from your mineral, vegetable, and animal organi- 
zation ? You have never thought — have you? — 
that your natural manhood was what forever lifted 
you out of mineral, vegetable, and animal relation- 
ship, and rendered you eternally solidaire with man- 
kind. Much more, if you have ever considered the 
truth of a Divine natural manhood at all, you have 
thought — have you not ? — that it was altogether 
personally constituted : that is, constituted by a person 
of another nature to ours, acting in fact in total aloof- 
ness from, and independence of, your and mine and 
all men's common nature, instead of identifying him- 
self exclusively with that nature, and glorifying it to 
Divine dimensions. Personality has never been any- 
thing else than a mark which we stupid men have 
required to assure us of our natural difference from 
mineral, vegetable, and animal, although we ourselves 
have none the less always contrived stupidly to in- 
terpret it into a providential signal of the natural 
relation of disunion or inequality we were under to 
our fellow-men. Accordingly when the Divine natu- 
ral humanity condescends to reveal itself in personal 
form, we may be sure that it is for no purpose of 
living to that form but only of dying to it, in order 
that men may cease any longer to find their life in 



OF THE SPIRITUAL ENDS OF NATURE, 237 

what merely differences them from lower natures, and 
seek it henceforth in all that identifies them with their 
own nature, now become Divine. 

But I am forgetting my purpose, which was to 
show a certain ontologic craze on the part of science, 
which rendering her view of nature hopelessly infirm 
or inadequate except for isoteric or shop purposes, 
utterly defeats her educational competence. 

This craze consists all simply in looking upon 
nature as a fixed or finite existence, thus as materially 
constituted, as being in short a strict phenomenon of 
space and time. It is all very well, mind, nay, it 
is a matter of stern necessity, to regard nature as 
materially or outwardly constituted to our senses. For 
inasmuch as nature is a purely metaphysic quantity, 
it is evident that she can only be reflected to our un- 
derstanding through the obedient mirror of physics. 
Her existence then to our recognition must be con- 
ditioned upon fixed or sensibly objective relations 
between mineral, vegetable, and animal substance ; 
otherwise it will be impossible for us ever to appre- 
hend her, ever to catch even a glimpse of her living 
and glorified presence. But this is not what science, 
at least in the person of her more renowned modern 
adepts, means. She does not hold that nature is de- 
pendent for her intellectual recognition by us on a 
certain objective or material imagery addressed pri- 



238 AND THEREFORE CONFOUNDS 

marily to our senses, and through them to our under- 
standing. By no means. She holds that nature is 
actually identical with this physical imagery, and has 
neither conceivable being nor existence apart from 
the unconscious forms which to a more instructed eye 
simply reveal her perfections. This is why I called 
this illusion a craze on the part of science. Surely 
you would think a man out of his wits who should 
identify himself with his image in a glass. And I 
in like manner deem science out of her wits when 
she identifies the mistress she professes to worship 
with the perishable mirror that reflects her. These 
objective or material facts, which so gravel and im- 
pede the onward march of science, are nothing, as 
we have seen, but ultimates of Divine order, in the 
sphere of sense ; just as bricks and mortar are ulti- 
mates in the same sphere of architectural order. You 
would not rate very high a man's genius who should 
pretend to deduce the architectural order of the Par- 
thenon from the stone and lime and water which 
nevertheless gave it its sole material basis ? So too 
you would not feel constrained to put a high estimate 
upon the conceited science, which — because it is able 
to lay a profane or familiar hand upon these mere 
bases, or material ultimates, of Divine order in human 
nature — irreverently supposes that it has got within 
its grasp the ineffable spiritual results of that order ? 



NATURE WITH PHYSICS. 239 

If so, I should feel painfully constrained in my turn 
not to put a very high estimate upon your philosophic 
sagacity. 

Spiritual creation cannot possibly be understood 
save in so far as the spiritual or created subject is 
seen to be invested incidentally with natural consti- 
tution. His person must be seen to be naturally 
constituted, in order to give him conscious projection 
from God, and make anything, even existence, truly 
predicable of him. For spiritual creation, you re- 
member, is purely subjective creation • that is, the 
creator gives being to the creature only by giving 
Himself to him, or endowing him with his own infi- 
nite substance. But no mere person, much less all 
persons, would be equal to this Divine communi- 
cation, unless it incidentally provided, or involved in 
itself, a natural or objective development on the part 
of the creature to give him background or a basis of 
identity ; otherwise it must instantly collapse or turn 
out a false pretension. There would be no created 
object at all commensurate with the creative subject ; 
and creation consequently, which, to begin with, is a 
strict equation between creator and creature, would 
fall through, or confess itself impossible from the 
start. This is all that Swedenborg means by his doc- 
trine of natural ultimates as incidental to spiritual 
creation. It is a doctrine which, for the first time in 



240 IT CLAIMS THAT NATURAL EXISTENCE 

the philosophic annals of the mind, not only accounts 
for Nature, and perfectly accounts for it too, but 
brings the dread and formidable spiritual world itself 
into our own keeping, as it were, by harnessing it and 
taming it down to the phenomena of men's familiar 
natural history. Any other doctrine would turn the 
creator into a mere magician, or supreme charlatan, 
making everything out of nothing, and so avouching 
himself infinitely below not merely any renowned art- 
ist, but any honest stone-mason. For the mason's art 
does n't pretend to make bricks without straw, or sub- 
jective existence without any objective implication, 
but finds its ultimation also in things most real and 
tangible to our senses, whereby alone it is that we are 
never liable to mistake it for a mere creation of the 
fata morgana. 

Now it would be by no means remarkable if science 
should be content to fix her regard exclusively upon 
this constitutive sphere of things, thus objectively in- 
volved in the spiritual or subjective creation. For 
this outwardly objective sphere of things constitutes 
the true and legitimate field of her activity, furnishes 
her with her sole raison d'etre in fact \ and within 
that sphere accordingly none can gainsay her voice. 
But she is not thus content in point of fact. Some 
busy imp from some dusky hell of ambition has bitten 
her with an unfortunate desire to dogmatize, or take 



IS IDENTICAL WITH SPIRITUAL BEING. 241 

captive the realm of faith in man; that is to say, the 
field of his interior knowledge as well as his external. 
This is the only reason why I have allowed myself to 
call her craze an ontologic one. It does not confine 
itself to speculating upon existence, but assuming 
apparently that natural existence is the same thing 
with spiritual being, it undertakes authoritatively to 
check or limit what is by what sensibly appears to be ; 
or array natural constitution against spiritual creation, 
Thus where Swedenborg says that all natural existence 
is created by a soul of use behind it — use to other 
and higher things — our modern science affirms that 
all natural existence is constituted by some primary 
natural substance, say protoplasm, and that there is 
an end of the matter. There can be no objection of 
course to the scientific man's attempt to reduce if he 
can all organized existence to a common basis ; but 
the objection comes in when he attempts to make any 
formula of his on this grossly gratuitous and imper- 
tinent subject, of vital concern to philosophy. For 
in doing this he at once betrays his crass ignorance 
of what philosophy means, confounding, for example, 
every concept that is proper and dear to it with its 
exact opposite, individuality with identity, life with 
existence, form with substance, cause with condition, 
creation with constitution. Philosophy is perfectly in- 
different to what naturally constitutes existence or 



242 PEOFESSOR HUXLEY 

gives it outward body, but reserves all her interest 
for what spiritually creates it, or gives it inward soul. 
To misconceive and misrepresent this, however, is the 
inveterate temptation of clever scientific men, and the 
infirmity has never been more aptly illustrated than 
in the developments of our recent scientific material- 
ism. " Pursue," says Professor Huxley, " the nettle 
and the oak, the midge and the mammoth, the infant 
and the adult, Shakespeare and Caliban, to their com- 
mon root, and you have protoplasm for your pains. 
Beyond this analysis science cannot go ; and any 
metaphysic of existence consequently which is not 
fast tethered to this physical substance, which is not 
firmly anchored in protoplasm, is an affront to the 
scientific understanding." 

Such in substance is Professor Huxley's attitude to- 
wards philosophy. Professor Huxley is consciously no 
doubt a very independent man, and an uncommonly 
able writer ; but it seems to me very odd, to say the 
least, that any one interested not in the pursuit of 
scientific knowledge primarily, but of philosophic 
truth, should be at all moved, and especially at all 
disconcerted, by his facts : for whether they be scien- 
tifically valid or not, they are properly irrelevant to 
philosophy. Like Mr. Spencer, M. Taine, and all 
the other men who desire not only to make science 
the king, but also to invest it with the priesthood 



AS A PHILOSOPHER. 243 

of the mind, Professor Huxley restricts his researches 
to the principle of identity in existence — that point 
in which all existence becomes essentially chaotic or 
substantially indistinguishable. The philosopher, on 
the other hand, who sees science to be not the end 
but the means of the mind's ultimate enfranchisement, 
enlarges his researches to the principle of individual- 
ity in existence, or that comprehensive spiritual unity 
in which all existence becomes essentially cosmical, 
or formally differentiated inter se. Par be it from me 
to question Mr. Huxley's statistics, for I know noth- 
ing about them ; I only question, nay I am heartily 
amused by, the extravagant intellectual conclusions 
he deduces from them. I have no doubt, on his own 
showing, that the initial fact in all organization is 
protoplasm. But at the same time I avow myself 
unable to conceive a fact of less vital significance 
to philosophy. Philosophy cheerfully takes that and 
every similar fact of science for granted. The initial 
fact in the edifice of St. Peter's at Rome was a quan- 
tity of stone and lime. This fact was assumed by 
the architect as necessarily included in the form of 
his edifice, about which form alone he was concerned. 
The identity of his edifice, or what it possessed of 
common substance with all other buildings, interested 
him very little; only its individuality, or what it 
should possess of differential form from all other 



244 WHAT PROTOPLASM SYMBOLIZES 

buildings, was what exercised his imagination. To 
conceive of Michael Angelo concerning himself mainly 
with the rude protoplasm, or mere flesh and bones, 
of his building, is at once to reduce him from an 
architect to a mason. And, in like manner, to con- 
ceive the philosopher intent upon running man's im- 
mortal destiny, or spiritual form, into the abject slime 
out of which his body germinates, is to reduce him 
from a philosopher to a noodle. 

Protoplasm means intellectual chaos ; means the 
resolution of the existing cosmos into absolute form- 
lessness or disorder. That is to say : you cannot 
arrive at protoplasm experimentally or livingly, ex- 
cept by disowning our present cosmical form and 
order, except by eliminating all that you organically 
are, with all that is contingent upon your organiza- 
tion, namely : all your experience of life and con- 
sciousness, every fact of appetite and emotion, of 
reason and imagination, of passion and action, every- 
thing, in short, that constitutes you a living person 
and so stamps you of the slightest moment to phi- 
losophy. Protoplasm, in truth, as an intellectual 
symbol, means the extinguishing of the soul or life 
or being of things, and the permission of mere bodily 
existence to them, without any source either for them 
to exist, or go forth, from, but what is essentially in- 
ferior to themselves. Eor no one will pretend that 



TO THE INTELLECT. 245 

protoplasm, or the formless unqualified material of 
things, is any way comparable in intellectual interest 
with the least of its formed or qualified products. 
Nevertheless, to such absolute drivel does the man 
of science reduce himself when he aspires, on scien- 
tific grounds, to play the philosopher ! And such is 
the invariable penalty of violating spiritual bounds. 
The realm of Philosophy is invariably soul, or inward 
consciousness ; the realm of science is, as invariably, 
body, or outward sense. And although it is past all 
dispute that these two realms stand to each other in 
the relation of superstructure and base, it is none the 
less but all the more true that while the former is in- 
deed outwardly conditioned upon the latter, the latter 
is inwardly created by the former ; and hence that the 
higher realm of soul is no more continuous with the 
lower realm of body, than a house is continuous with 
its foundation, or a tree which fills the air with bloom 
and fragrance is continuous with its underground 
roots. The roots of the tree are a mere involution of 
the tree in order to its subsequent evolution, and any 
expansion they may attain to is not in the direction 
of the tree, but in a contrary or inverse direction, that 
of the earth. The foundation of the house in like 
manner is so wholly subservient to the house, that 
every subsequent enlargement it may chance to un- 
dergo in itself, will only enhance such subserviency 



246 PHYSICISM A PROVIDENTIAL GOSPEL. 

by carrying the foundation deeper, that is away from 
the house rather than towards it. 

Notwithstanding all I have said, however, I have 
not the least doubt that the gospel of physicism is a 
strictly providential movement in our mental history. 
I have no doubt that in thus making as it does tabula 
rasa, or a clean sweep, of our sensuous or inherited 
ontology, it does unwitting good service to the mind 
in clearing the ground for a new and purely spir- 
itual conception of being or life. Idealism seems in 
fact a gross but inevitable husk of the mind's spirit- 
ual advent. But its role is essentially critical : that 
is, it is not the least rightfully dogmatic. And noth- 
ing can be more insane, therefore, than to regard the 
new dogmatism as constituting the positive boon to 
the intellect which it ignorantly assumes to do. Our 
intelligence is built not upon negation but affirma- 
tion, and the current scientific idealism is at best but 
a transition point between the once active but always 
baseless and now defunct metaphysics of theology, 
and that philosophic naturalism or realism which is 
even now looming in our intellectual horizon, and 
ready to avouch itself the fixed immovable earth of 
the mind, the adamantine rock of man's spiritual 
faith and hope. 



LETTER XIX 




ND now, my dear friend, we are almost 
ready to take up the thread of discourse 
we dropped, in reference to the function 
of the church in history : almost ready, but not 
quite. Tor I think a little further effort should first 
be made perfectly to familiarize your thought with 
Swedenborg's philosophy of nature as being a strictly 
necessary involution of the spiritual creation. Noth- 
ing short of clear conceptions on this subject will per- 
manently avail to free the mind from the rubbish of 
inane and idle ontologic speculation which now threat- 
ens to drown it out. 

The intellectual formula to which the truth of the 
spiritual creation with its marvellous implication of 
nature reduces itself, may be thus expressed : The 
created subject, in order to his subjective life or con- 
sciousness being perfectly authenticated, requires that it 
be altogether outwardly or objectively realized, or claim 
a supremely natural root. The justification of this 



248 SWEDENBORG'S PHILOSOPHY 

intellectual formula, or law of thought, is to be found 
in the very nature of creation ; which, as being the 
operation of an infinite power, cut off therefore from 
all outside resources, is restricted to purely subjective 
issues ; and hence, in order spiritually to qualify its 
creature, or redeem him from the sheer and abject 
phenomenal subjectivity to which as a creature he is 
doomed, is obliged to endow him thereupon with a 
career of distinctively natural evolution, which may 
serve as a true and objective basis of his eventual 
spiritual enfranchisement. Creation of course is the 
prerogative of an infinite being j but we are in the 
habit of borrowing the word to characterize the prod- 
ucts of our own aesthetic genius or free activity. 
Thus we say Hamlet is a creation of Shakespeare, 
Dante created the Inferno, the Parthenon divides its 
creation between Callicrates and Phidias, the artist 
creates the statue. Now, of course, regarded strictly, 
it is not a just use of the word to employ it simply 
in the way of characterizing our unforced or sponta- 
neous activitv ; because it is essential to the creative 
idea that the creator give spiritual or living form to 
His creature only by Himself first furnishing him 
with natural or mother-substance. And Shakespeare, 
Dante, and the rest, may worry themselves out of 
their meagre wits, before they will ever be able any 
of them to endow the products of their distinctive 



OF NATUKE. 249 



genius with anything more than a purely lifeless or 
imaginative existence ; for with all their genius they 
can never bestow upon its offspring natural subjectiv- 
ity or mother-substance. 

Still we may get a very good hypothetical illustra- 
tion out of the word even in this familiar misuse of it. 
Let us suppose then that the artist were a veritable 
creator, and had power accordingly to give his statue 
subjective or conscious life by himself spiritually 
vivifying the marble from which it comes. In that 
case one thing would be at once clear, and that is, 
that the statue would be no longer as now a dead 
material form, but a conscious or quasi-living one, 
instinct, no doubt, through its vivified mother-sub- 
stance with all its creator's genius. But another 
thing would be almost equally clear, and that is, that 
he would never be able to reproduce that genius in 
himself. Why not ? Because this ability would pre- 
suppose in the statue a certain interior or sympathetic 
discernment and appreciation of its creator's genius, 
whereas he is as yet, by the hypothesis of his finite 
maternal genesis, debarred all interior or sympathetic 
experience, and made conscious alone of his own 
material or outward existence. By the necessity of 
his finite generation he is ignorant not only of his 
creator's genius or individualitv, but also of his crea- 
tor's name or identity ; ignorant in fact of everything 



250 GOOD AND EVIL THE MERE 

but his mother-substance, and the outward life and 
sustenance wherewith it fills his veins. It is indeed 
evident to the least reflection that this self-conscious 
life of the statue — the self-conscious or quasi-lite 
he derives from the mother — instead of spiritually 
approximating him to the father, will have the effect 
in the first instance to render him spiritually remote 
from the father, or spiritually alienate him from his 
creative source by filling him with the sentiment and 
animus of independent or unrelated existence. And 
consequently before he can come into any genuine 
spiritual or aesthetic sympathy and fellowship with 
the father, it is necessary that his natural force be 
abated — that he inwardly die to it in fact as the 
supreme law of his activity, and so rise again to the 
experience of an inward and better life. 

But how shall we even conceive of any such issue 
coming about in the case supposed? In the first 
place when a thing is naturally biased to infirmity, 
and its nature is yet the only force it obeys or even 
recognizes, it seems impossible ever to expect it vol- 
untarily to contract a contrary bias. The trite lines 
of the Roman poet: 

" Facilis descensus Averni, 
Sed revocare gradum, superasque evadere ad auras, 
Hie labor, hoc opus, est " : 

easily suggest the smooth and flowery path of dal- 



EAKTH OF THE FINITE CONSCIOUSNESS. 251 

liance that leads downward, and the sharp and 
arduous return path. But I very much doubt 
whether Virgil himself, or any other poet, Pagan or 
Christian, has ever faced the real difficulty. The real 
difficulty in the way of a man becoming good out of 
evil, or celestial out of infernal, is that good and evil, 
heaven and hell, are not outgrowths or accidents of the 
human personality by any means, but necessary con- 
stituents of human nature itself, by which the nature 
becomes freely developed to the recognition of its sub- 
jects, and by whose active oppugnancy and contrast 
it becomes enabled at last in the person of some 
adequate subject gradually to slough off its infirm 
mortal lineaments, and ally itself with infinitude. 
Good and evil, heaven and hell, are not facts of creative, 
but of purely constitutive order. They bear primarily 
upon man's natural destiny, and have no relation to 
his spiritual freedom save through that. They are the 
mere geology of our natural consciousness, and this is 
all they are. They have no distinctively supernatural 
quality nor efficacy whatever. They have a simply 
constitutional relevancy to the earth of man's asso- 
ciated consciousness, and disavow therefore any prop- 
erly creative or controlling relation to his spiritual 
or individual freedom. We have been traditionally 
taught that good and evil, heaven and hell, were 
objective realities, having an absolute ground of 



252 HEAVEN AND HELL HAVE ONLY 

being in the creative perfection. But this is the 
baldest, most bewildering nonsense. They have not 
a grain of objective reality in them, and are noway 
vitalized by the absolute Divine perfection. They are 
purely subjective appearances, vitalized exclusively 
by the created imperfection, or the uses they subserve 
to our provisional moral and rational consciousness. 
When accordingly this consciousness — having more 
than fulfilled its legitimate office, and become as it 
now is a mere stumbling-block or rock of offence to 
the regenerate mind of the race — finally expires in 
its own stench, or else frankly allows itself to be 
taken up and disappear in our advancing social and 
aesthetic consciousness, good and evil, heaven and hell, 
will cease to be appearances even. For angel and 
devil, saint and sinner, will then find themselves per- 
fectly fused or made over in a new or comprehensive 
race-manhood which will laugh to scorn our best 
empirical or tentative manhood, that is, our existing 
civic and ecclesiastic manhood so-called. Thus, as I 
have said somewhere else, I am fully persuaded for 
my part, that no objective heaven will ever be found 
expanding to our foolish personal hope, nor any ob- 
jective hell ever be found responsive to our foolish 
personal fear. We may be very sure that our true 
immortality, that which is energized by the Divine 
natural humanity, is far too human and miraculous 



A SUBJECTIVE TRUTH. 253 

to be mechanized on any such preposterously simple 
basis. No man, not a simpleton in all spiritual 
regards, will ever acknowledge a heaven of which he 
himself is not his own sole St. Peter, nor any hell of 
which he is not his own jealous and exclusive turn- 
key. Assuredly no heaven could exert the attractive 
force of a toyshop to a good man's imagination, if it 
aimed to conciliate his self-love and his love of the 
world ; and no hell could exert the binding force of a 
cobweb to an evil man's imagination, if its primary 
aim were not to conciliate those exacting loves. 

But we are digressing. If the evil of men then did 
not refer itself primarily to their nature, as that nature 
is determined by its spiritual Divine source, but were 
an outward or physical experience of the subject, 
asserting itself primarily through his sensations, there 
could be no manner of difficulty in the evil subject 
winning himself back to the upper air. For man's 
veriest life is a sensitive one at the best, and if any 
serious conflict accordingly should announce itself be- 
tween the life of his senses and that of his habitual 
subjective aspirations, it is safe to say that he would 
very speedily end by renouncing the latter. 

But the idea is simply stupid. Evil is not an out- 
ward thing save to the inexperienced mind. Hell is 
not objectively constituted save to a juvenile and 
flimsy imagination. It is on the contrary a purely 



254 SUBJECTIVE GENESIS 

subjective life in man, being the bloom of that exces- 
sive delight he takes in his new-found natural self, and 
its proper belongings : a delight so naive and sincere 
at first, and at length so infatuated or magical, as to 
be capable of making evil seem unadulterate good, 
and falsity undissembled truth. So that what you vir- 
tually ask of an evil man in expecting him to become 
heavenly, is literally to turn himself outside in, or 
dilapidate himself as to his existing carnal structure, 
and build himself up anew in quite an opposite style 
of life or consciousness to that which alone seems to 
him either practicable or savory. In short, you ask 
a rigid impossibility of him. Swedenborg is emi- 
nently explicit and satisfactory as to this rigidly natu- 
ral genesis of evil in man. He says somewhere — I 
forget at this moment exactly where, but I am very 
sure generally that it is in his most interesting little 
book on the laws of the Divine Providence : but I 
beseech you not to argue from this amiable scrupu- 
losity of mine in trying to supply you with chapter and 
verse for all my citations from Swedenborg, that I 
hold his sayings to be of the slightest conceivable 
intellectual authority, for I do no such stupid thing ; 
and indeed if I were a priori inclined to any such 
fatuity, his books would supply the best possible cor- 
rective of the inclination, being the only books I know 
which inwardly, or of their own proper substance, abjure 



OF HELL IN MAN. 255 



such an ungodly pretension : — that he had been, for 
demonstrative purposes no doubt, let into the life of 
hell in man ; and he found it to be a life of such abun- 
dant and exquisite delight, arising from the immense 
love of dominion consequent upon the unrestrained 
love of self in the subject, that all the delights of the 
world seemed dull in comparison with it. He de- 
scribes it, I remember, as " a delight of the whole mind 
from its centre to its circumference," though it only- 
reported itself in the body as a certain triumphant 
swelling of the breast. And this delight moreover 
would never invite compression, as he says, if it were 
not for the tendency it has to express itself in unjust 
and injurious action. Whenever accordingly this in- 
herent tendency ultimates itself outwardly, the evil- 
doer finds his inward freedom, which is the freedom 
of willing and thinking evil, suddenly converted into 
outward bondage, which is an inability to do evil. 
For hell is a condition of life in which men's outward 
necessities constrain them to live together in harmony, 
while they have no inward bent to that style of life. 
The possibility of their co-existence in this condition 
depends upon an inflexible law : that no person shall 
ever be alloioed to harm another ivith impunity. This 
salutary law, which is full of infinite Divine benignity 
towards them, each and all, and which heavenly- 
minded people inwardly impose upon themselves 



256 HELL IS ALWAYS HEAVEN TO THE EVIL MAN 

every moment, is yet to hellish-minded people an 
absolute bondage, and constitutes the sole drawback 
or qualification to their bad blessedness. For what 
can be more absolutely disgusting to one who delights 
in willing and thinking evil towards another, than to 
be constrained by the righteous fear of punishment 
from ever doing him any evil? There can be no 
intenser hell known to a selfish man than to have a 
prudent regard for others thus enforced upon him. 
But Swedenborg always takes pains to apprize his 
gentle reader that the practical administration of this 
law, which the evil man finds it so hard, and the good 
man so easy, to submit to, undergoes all needful 
mitigation — short, to be sure, of rendering its chas- 
tisements ineffectual — through its always taking 
place under the most watchful and tender angelic 
supervision or control.* 



* The broad flood of light which Swedenborg throws upon the inti- 
mate Divine dealings with human nature throughout history, ending 
with its final apotheosis, or actual Divine glorification, is apt to leave his 
reader disenchanted of any speculative interest he may have felt in 
regard to the continued existence of hell. I think that a man must 
have read Swedenborg to little intellectual profit, if his' mind is not 
hopefully made up to two things : First, that the antagonism of heaven 
and hell on moral grounds, or as a tradition of human nature, is some 
day sure to be done away with by the advance of human society or fel- 
lowship : Second, that its persistence as a spiritual tradition, or condition 
of individual experience and culture, may always be counted upon. Still 



BUT WHEN HE IS FORCED NOT TO DO EVIL. 257 

But we are losing sight of our hypothetical illustra- 
tive statue. The statue, then, in accordance with its 
constitutional limitations, and in spite of its apparent 
subjective vivification, must remain utterly hopeless of 
regeneration, or aesthetic life ; that is, must forever 
despair of reproducing in itself the genius which 
begat it. I say this is in accordance with its consti- 
tutional limitations ; for its constitutive or mother- 
substance which gives it body, can do no more for it 
than give it body ; that is, cannot give it soul, or 
make it inwardly responsive to its creator's genius. 
And this simply because the constitutive or mother- 
substance of the statue was originally or in itself 
independent of the artist's genius, and beyond a cer- 
tain point therefore refractory to his will. This in 
truth is the inherent defect of all artistic creation, that 
the artist is without infinitude, even his genius not 
being original with him, but inherited or derived 

I have thought it best to throw together a few brief passages from his 
books, which may be suggestive of thought to you. His books contain 
no dogmatic statement of opinion on the subject of the eternity of the 
hells now so much mooted between the sentimentalist and traditionalist 
wings of the church ; and questions of this magnitude besides can 
never be settled for us by any the wisest and most erudite head, but 
only by our own wise and loving hearts. At all events all Swedenborg's 
utterances on the subject may be looked at without suspicion, as they 
have no pretension to be anything else than obiter dicta, or observations 
by-the-way. See Appendix A. 



258 HUMAN NATURE THE SOLE 

from his past ancestry ; and hence he is obliged to find 
the material or mother-substance of his work exclu- 
sively within outward nature, and not, like the Divine 
genius, within Himself, or the resources of His own 
infinite spirit. Were the artist infinite like God to 
begin with — that is, did he also supply from his 
own aesthetic resources natural or mother-substance 
to his creations — then his creatures, like God's, would 
be capable of aesthetic regeneration or spontaneous 
life, by virtue of his prior capacity to overcome for 
them any latent death-tendency inherent in their 
merely constitutional substance. 

And thus our supposititious statue perfectly illus- 
trates, in a negative way, the positive truth I wish to 
impress upon you, namely : that the spiritual creation 
derives all its power to function from the implication 
or involution of the created nature. The actual — or 
ultimate and phenomenal — sphere of creative order 
is the sole sphere of creative power, in other words ; 
and if the power fail here, accordingly, the entire 
spiritual creation must instantly come to an end, like 
a tale that is told. If the creative power is unable to 
reduce the creative nature to order, and that more- 
over to an order perfectly consonant with His own 
infinitude or perfection, the day must soon come 
when the creative name itself will be blotted out 
from men's recognition. But if it is competent — 



SPHERE OF CREATIVE POWER. 259 

even infinitely competent to this sublime neces- 
sity, then we have only to look forward to the 
fast approaching advent of the Divine kingdom on 
earth — the earth, namely, of mans redeemed natural 
subjectivity, mind you, and not at all, save by im- 
plication in that superior earth, the mere outside 
objective earth of his mineral, vegetable, and animal 
existence — and the consequent advent of a heaven 
of spiritual peace, felicity, and power in man, every 
way unimaginable save upon the basis of that re- 
deemed or Divine-natural earth. 

But you ask me not merely to assert this com- 
petency of God to our natural redemption, but to 
state the method of it. And that statement will 
require a complete letter to itself, or perhaps two. 



LETTER XX. 




Y DEAR FRIEND: — Our almost soli- 
tary topic hitherto has been creation. 
And creation is first of all a rigid practi- 
cal equation between creator and creature, 
or the creative and created natures. No doubt creator 
evolves creature, as subject evolves object. But then 
as involution is always equal to evolution, being its 
strict logical counterpart or correlative, so if creator 
evolve creature, or subject object, just as truly on the 
other hand does creature mvolve creator or object sub- 
ject. But if this were all the truth upon the subject, 
creation would be defeated by its own genesis. Eor 
where involution and evolution are thus logically 
equal, creature and creator, object and subject, prac- 
tically neutralize each other, and no logical exodus 
from the difficulty is either possible or conceivable. 
That is, creator and creature must confess themselves 
convertible terms, in order to creation becoming liv- 
ing or conscious. Created life or consciousness is 



CREATION A FUSION OF GOD AND MAN. 261 



possible only on one condition, which is : that crea- 
tion exhibit so complete a fusion between its uncon- 
scious and conscious factors, as practically to annul 
their logical inequality, and so make the resultant life 
or consciousness one. It is impossible that God should 
create absolute life or being — that is to say, what 
has life or being in itself — for such life or being 
is ex vi termini uncreated, would in truth be God 
himself. He can only create therefore what has not 
life or being in itself, what consequently is merely 
relative or associated life or being, and consists in 
loving others : and He creates this only by the free 
or infinite communication to the creature of His own 
life or being, that is, of Himself. It is this infinite 
communication which alone makes created life or 
consciousness conceivable. For how shall that which 
by the hypothesis of its creatureship is void of life or 
consciousness in its own right, ever attain to actual 
life or consciousness, but by the free unstinted com- 
munication of its creator's life to it as henceforth its 
own life ? 

We, nevertheless, misled by sense, have had the 
fatuity to conceive that creator and creature are 
essentially inconvertible terms, sternly repudiating 
each the other's practical identification with itself. 
We are in the habit of postulating such an essential 
oppugnancy between them, as necessarily converts 



262 IT INCLUDES CREATOR 

human life into a sign or witness of their inveterate 
duality, and so fills the universe of consciousness with 
pride, blasphemy, and despair. How necessarily we 
make creation appear the limping, one-horse-concern 
it does appear, in thus making it include the creature 
but exclude the creator, or include matter and ex- 
clude mind or spirit ! As if the creature could ever 
be given without the logical implication of creator to 
constitute him ! Or the creator ever be given with- 
out the logical explication of creature to reveal Him ! 
What wonder is it, under these circumstances, that 
our men of science should tend so generally to iden- 
tify God's glory primarily with sun, moon and stars, 
and only secondarily or derivatively with man ? Our 
traditional creeds to be sure still echo the ancient 
faith of mankind, that matter and mind, nature and 
spirit, are inextricably married or interfused ; but this 
faith has so little vitality left, or has become so com- 
pletely fossilized by the worldliness of the Church, 
that very many of our leading scientific men spring 
eagerly to the conviction, which some of them do not 
hesitate to avow, that the material universe exists ab- 
solutely, or for its own sake exclusively, and betrays 
no record whatever of a creator. 

Such is the intellectual disability which our igno- 
rance and imbecility in regard to the spiritual truth of 
creation inevitably impose upon us \ and so long as 



AND CREATURE QUITE EQUALLY. 263 

we remain contentedly disabled we must forego our 
intellectual manhood, and lie supine and inert in 
spiritual infancy. For manifestly so long as I am 
content to look upon creation, not as the living fusion, 
but as the living divorce of the two natures, creator 
and creature, I must necessarily think the divine 
nature to be essentially alien or antagonistic to my 
own. That is to sav, I can never think of God as a 
being of an essentially human quality. And if I can- 
not think of God in this light, if I do not think of 
him as essential man, I had better not think of him at 
all, since I cannot think of him to any good but only 
to an evil purpose. For if God is my creator, and yet 
claims a nature essentially alien and antagonistic to 
my own, I never can really love him, because I can 
never really know him, inasmuch as I cannot know 
what my nature does not qualify me to know. In 
fact I can only hate him, however much my prudence 
may lead me to dissimulate my hate ; for no rational 
being can feel himself at the mercy of a power infi- 
nitely superior to himself, and at the same time utterly 
alien and antagonistic to himself, without a righteous 
hatred to such power. So that if every man is — 
spiritually or intellectually — only what his idea of 
God makes him, I may freely say that my idea of God 
as being of a nature essentially foreign and repugnant 
to my own, makes all my worship of him supersti- 



264 DEISM AS A PHILOSOPHY 

tious or depraved, and hence fixes me in intellectual 
night. So long as I admit an essential contrariety be- 
tween the two natures, which I needs must do when I 
in thought identify the creative activity primarily with 
the geometry of the physical universe, and refuse to 
identify it, save in a very secondary and derivative or 
indirect way, with the laws of the human mind, I 
never can rationally acknowledge the Divine exist- 
ence, nor consequently ever honestly worship it. For 
human nature claims so divine a quality to my im- 
agination — seems to be so infinitely worthy of my 
devout love and worship — that I cannot spontane- 
ously recognize any divinity outside of it. And if I 
yet pretend to recognize such a divinity, and offer 
Him my servile or interested homage, what am I 
but a degraded being, sunk in spiritual penury, or 
intellectual savagery? I may indeed be all uncon- 
scious of my degradation, because such multitudes 
partake it in common with me ; but there it unmis- 
takably is, all the while, nevertheless. 

In short, deism as a philosophic doctrine, that is, as 
importing an essential difference between the divine 
and human natures, or God and man, is a philosophic 
absurdity. There is no God but the Lord, or our 
glorified natural humanity, and whatsoever other 
deity we worship, is but a baleful idol of our own 
spiritual fantasy, whom we superstitiously project into 



IS A GROSS ABSURDITY. 265 

nature to scourge us into quasi or provisional man- 
hood, while as yet we are blind to the spiritual truth. 
We ourselves reflect upon the universe the divinity 
which dwells latent, and unrecognized — if not cruci- 
fied, in our souls ; and we see only what we ourselves 
give. The untaught rustic may look forever at the 
shapeless block of marble, without receiving a hint 
from it of its essential subserviency to the uses of Art. 
So we might forever contemplate the material world, 
without its ever giving us so much as a suggestion of 
deity, unless our inivard instinct of his omnipresence 
compelled the suggestion. The animal sees the same 
things we see. Why does not he also suspect a latent 
divinity ? Simply because he, unlike us, is destitute 
of an inward divine genius or nature, and hence has 
no power to shed an outward shadow of divinity upon 
things below him. No. God is a denizen first of 
the microcosm, and only by reflection thence of the 
macrocosm. That is to say, he spiritually inhabits 
the human mind alone, and what we discern of him 
in the mechanism of nature, or the laws of the uni- 
verse, is but a faint image or reverberation of the 
living death, or spiritual infamy, to which we con- 
sign Him in our own souls, while as yet we are obdu- 
rate to the solicitations of His essential humanity. 

Now it strikes me that what I have just been say- 
ing is very true in its place, but that this is not its 



266 CREATION CONSISTS SPIRITUALLY 

place ; at all events it is not exactly what I set out 
to say. What I intended at starting to show you 
was that creation, being this undeniable spiritual or 
infinite equation of the Divine and human natures 
which I have described it to be, would be a very 
shallow form of blessing to bestow upon the creature. 
If the entire creative bounty consisted in giving the 
creature existence, if it involved no deeper, subtler 
Divine mercy than this, creation would turn out a 
signal curse to man, for it would leave the Divine 
being a mere prey to man's devouring and destroying 
appetites and passions. By creation alone — that is 
to say, creation left undivinized by the creature's 
subsequent natural redemption — man is made sim- 
ply self-conscious, and endowed moreover with self- 
hood of a marvellously infirm and even infra-bestial 
character. Tor in that case God's creature, unlike 
the beasts, would have no instinct to moderate and 
mitigate his natural ferocity, but would be an un- 
qualified form of raven and slaughter. Accordingly 
I repeat, that if creation resulted only in giving 
man conscious existence, or phenomenal selfhood, it 
would be a boon altogether unworthy of the creator 
to bestow. 

Creation, however, is not of this futile pattern. It 
does not consist, either wholly or in part, in giving 
the creature self-consciousness, or investing him with 



IN DIVINIZING THE CREATED NATURE; 267 

phenomenal personality. ' It merely assumes these 
things in the creature, or takes them for granted, as 
the outcome and expression of his essential spiritual 
imbecility and nothingness. And then it forthwith 
proceeds to make this negative base or spiritual 
unconsciousness of the creature the surest possible 
guarantee of his subsequent spiritual conjunction and 
fellowship with God. We may say then that crea- 
tion, viewed as a spiritual or. infinite Divine process, 
necessarily involves to the created intelligence two 
stages, first : a descending or centrifugal one, in 
which the creator becomes thoroughly identified with 
the nature of the creature, in becoming thoroughly 
alienated from his finite personality ; and, secondly • 
an ascending or centripetal stage, in which the crea- 
ture becomes exalted in his turn to immortal spirit- 
ual conjunction with God, in renouncing the interests 
of his proper person whenever they conflict with those 
of his common nature. 

How is this natural redemption of the creature 
practically brought about? We shall be best able 
to answer this question by keeping clearly in mind 
what we have seen to be the precise form of evil in 
the creature to which his finite genesis, or his very 
nature as a creature, exposes him, and from which it 
is the true glory of God to deliver him. 

The evil then to which, as we have seen, man is 



268 AND SO REDEEMING IT FROM 

naturally prone, and indeed doomed by his finite gen- 
eration, is personal consciousness, or the feeling of life 
in himself as his own life absolutely, or without re- 
spect to other men. There is no evil at all comparable 
with this either for comprehensiveness or intensity, 
if it be allowed to go uncorrected ; for it is altogether 
fatal to man's spiritual life, which consists in his 
loving his neighbor as himself. Now the only possi- 
ble way for a man to do this is to feel that he is not 
self-centred, that his life is not his own personally, 
but belongs to him in strict community with his 
neighbor; thus that he and his neighbor are both 
alike dependent at every moment for every breath of 
life they draw upon one and the same merciful and 
impartial source. In other words a man loves his 
neighbor as himself only by virtue of his first loving 
God above himself, or supremely. And the only way 
this supreme love becomes developed or educated in 
him, is through his moral experience, or his obedience 
to law. Whenever, and so long as, man is tempted 
to commit false or malicious speaking, theft, adultery, 
murder, or covetousness, and yet abstains from doing 
it out of a sincere inward regard for the Divine name, 
his self-love, so far as it is harmful, is spiritually 
slain, and the Divine love infallibly replaces it. These 
formal vices express the whole substantial evil known 
to the human heart, and when man, therefore, in the 



THE POWER AND TAINT OF EVIL. 269 

exercise of a felt freedom and rationality deposes them 
or any of them from their habitual control over his 
action, not because thev conflict with his outward 
welfare, or expose him to the contempt of men, but 
simply because they wound his inward reverence for 
the Divine name, he becomes spiritually regenerate or 
new-born. Falsehood, theft, adultery, murder, and 
covetousness are, in other words, only signs or sym- 
bols of a deeper and altogether latent spiritual evil 
fatally separating man from God : the evil of a su- 
preme self-love. Grave as these evils unquestionably 
are in themselves, or absolutely, they have yet only 
a superficial moral quality, that is, grow out of men's 
still unreconciled or inharmonic relations inter se, or 
their frank insubjection to the social sentiment, and 
do not by any means necessarily imply any perma- 
nent spiritual or individual estrangement between 
them and God. 

But the evil consciousness which they typify in 
men is man's only true and spiritual evil. The con- 
sciousness of a finite existence or selfhood, given out- 
right to every man in strict independence of every other 
man: this is essential death and hell to the human 
bosom, and spiritually litters all its abounding moral 
corruption. Why? Because it practically gives the 
lie to men's spiritual creatureship, or affirms that 
they have no natural form and order corresponding to 



270 THE EVIL OF HUMAN NATURE 

their inward or spiritual unity in God. Accordingly 
if man's mind had never been fatally drugged by this 
stupid conceit of his rightful independence of his 
neighbor in the Divine sight, he would never have 
been so suicidal as to dream of coveting the goods, or 
wounding the honor, or compassing the life of his 
neighbor. On the contrary he would have been exqui- 
sitely sure to defend his neighbor's interests as if they 
were his own. Thus it is man's very nature as a crea- 
ture to absorb or appropriate the Divine life or being 
to his own paltry and fantastic little self; and the Di- 
vine name consequently would soon have lapsed from 
human regard even as a tradition, were the creature 
not all the while providentially prompted to conceal 
his flagrant misappropriation of the Divine substance 
from his own eyes, by assiduously expropriating the 
mere name of God to any worthless or imaginary 
supernatural candidate who may apply for the distinc- 
tion : so relegating his creator to an entirely objective 
or outward relation to himself. 

Subjective or personal consciousness, then : the feel- 
ing we all of us have that our natural selfhood is our 
own absolutely, and without reference to any grander 
natural objectivity, such for example as society : is 
the brimming spiritual death wrapped up in every 
man by virtue of his finite generation. And now we 
shall be able to see with all possible clearness with 



IS SUBJECTIVE CONSCIOUSNESS. 271 

what a mighty hand the Divine providence delivers 
us from this infernal blight incident to our nature. 

The inevitable vice of man's natural subjectivity, or 
finite selfhood, is, that it exteriorates object to subject, 
or places a man's proper life outside and below the man 
himself. This is hopelessly contrary to the spiritual 
order of human life, which interiorates object to sub- 
ject, and places a man's proper life within or above the 
man himself. In other words, the fundamental infirm- 
ity of human nature is that it subjects man primarily 
to the control of sense, and allows him only so much 
soul, or spirituality, as consists with that primary 
requisite. In confirmation of this, we may point to 
the notorious fact, that the method of man's spiritual 
or private regeneration has always been defined by 
the professing church as standing in no frivolous 
moral change or improvement wrought in the subject, 
but only in a change of heart : that is, such a com- 
plete reversal of the law of his nature as makes him 
act henceforth from the impulsion of an inward mo- 
tive or object, instead of an outward one. It is well 
known, moreover, that the church has always looked 
upon this reversal of the law of his nature as prac- 
tically energized by the subject inwardly constraining 
himself, through a most living reverence for the Divine 
name, to deny his senses whenever they prompt him 
to selfish or unmanly action. 



272 MAN'S MORAL EVILS ARE NOT 

Do not mistake ray present purpose, however, in 
this reference. We are not now talking of a man's 
spiritual or private regeneration, which is his individ- 
ual deliverance from the law of his nature, but of a 
much grander problem. We are talking in this place 
of our poor and abject human nature itself, and of the 
peculiar freeing or infiniting it gets at the Divine 
hands from the bondage imposed upon it by our 
wretched personalities, both good and evil. Tor 
human nature itself is condemned in its turn to inev- 
itable and hopeless limitation or flniteness by all its 
personal subjects, whether these be relatively to each 
other celestial or infernal ; and is bound therefore by 
the Divine righteousness to undergo in its turn also a 
plenary redemption. And the question of immediate 
interest to us is, to ascertain the method of this tran- 
scendent Divine deliverance. This is the problem I 
am about trying to solve to your understanding. If 
I only approximately solve it, I shall nevertheless 
deem myself entitled to claim your patient attention 
while doing thus much. But if I succeed in perfectly 
solving it, as I hope to be able to do — and that too 
without claiming to myself any exceptional ability — 
I trust that you then, like me, will honestly give 
the sole praise of my performance to the boundless 
intellectual inspiration and illumination of the Chris- 
tian truth. 



THE TRUE EVIL OF HIS NATURE. 273 

The characteristic natural evil of man is subjective 
consciousness. Naturally ignorant that his life or be- 
ing inheres exclusively in God his creator (though he 
is no way backward to admit that it originally came 
from Him), he unhesitatingly appropriates it to him- 
self, feeling himself to be good when its issues are 
orderly, and evil when its issues are disorderly. This 
I say is the natural and therefore the deepest evil 
known to the human race. Man no doubt attributes 
to himself personally many much lesser evils than 
this, such as murder, adultery, false witness, theft, and 
covetousness, and thinks if he were once well rid of 
these outward evils, he would be inwardly or spirit- 
ually quit of evil altogether; neither knowing nor 
dreaming that his moral maladies are only so many 
visible symptoms of a far deeper invisible disease in 
his nature to the cure of which God alone is ade- 
quate. These moral evils, however grievous they 
may justly seem in a scientific or police estimate of 
human life, are of absolutely no consequence in a 
philosophic estimate, save as revealing that profound 
and otherwise undiscoverable spiritual evil in man to 
which alone they owe every fibre of their unhand- 
some existence. This latter evil is the only deadly 
evil known to the heart, because it is the only one 
which directly impugns the Divine sovereignty over 
His creatures ; and in giving man deliverance from its 



274 THAT CONSISTS IN EXTERIORATING 

dominion accordingly, the Divine love restores him 
ipso facto to moral purity. 

Now the immediate effect, as I have before said, of 
this fallacious subjective consciousness in man, or 
of his inwardly appropriating the Divine substance 
to himself, is to put the creator bodily outside of 
His creation to the imagination of His creature : to 
compel Him to occupy at best a merely magisterial or 
legal and critical relation to His creature ; in short : to 
relegate the father of our spirits to a purely external 
and objective intercourse with us. By this misappro- 
priation of the creative life or being to himself, the 
creature becomes the only subjective consciousness, 
the only conscious form of selfhood, known to the 
universe, and by an unerring instinct of that limitary 
form after thus appropriating to himself the Divine 
substance, he instantly hastens — as if to hide that 
ugly transaction from his own eyes — to expropriate, 
as I have before said, the robbed and rifled Divine 
name away from himself, in relegating it to the 
use of any imaginary supernatural pretender who 
seems worthy of it, and evinces such worth by con- 
senting to stand in a purely sensible or outward and 
objective relation to him : that is, consenting to treat 
him as an absolutely free and rational subject, right- 
fully praiseworthy and blameworthy on the ground of 
his own independent merits alone: that is, as a dis- 



THE CREATOR TO THE CREATURE. 275 

tinctly private and sacred person utterly ignoring and 
disallowing a social, public, or race-consciousness. 

Of course this little provisional drama that I have 
just been describing, enacts itself within, and confines 
itself to, the limits of the creature's consciousness, and 
those limits exclusively, and does not even project a 
passing shadow of itself upon the field of his true 
and intimate yet most unconscious relations to God. 
But within these limits the most High does tenderly 
condescend to the part assigned Him by his auda- 
cious creature, and unfalteringly play it out more- 
over to its last gasp of humiliation. For only by the 
creator consenting to incarnate himself in flesh and 
blood, and play the part of real object to the crea- 
ture's fallacious subjectivity, does the drama of human 
nature and history convert itself out of a stupid and 
meaningless farce, into a grand, sublime, and tragic 
revelation of the infinite and eternal perfection. Do 
you ask me, How? I will gladly proceed to tell 
you, for this at length is the whole point of my pro- 
tracted epistolary mission to you. 

— But in order to do so fairly and squarely, I shall 
be obliged to make an addition to the sum of these 
specifically intercalary letters. 



■ '" " 11 




jul-jul--xl m ui™ja, m u m ju^i— ^ i n n w ty~t! 



LETTER XXI, 




Y DEAR FRIEND : — We have seen that 
I the creator, because He gives being to the 
creature, must always remain the latter's 
sole and total vital substance. How, in 
this state of things, shall the creature ever attain to 
selfhood, or come to feel himself an alien being to 
God? 

Only in a way we may be sure of the strictest illu- 
sion, or in consequence of a gross deception imposed 
on him by his senses. 

In the first place the creature is necessarily igno- 
rant of the truth of a spiritual creation, and utterly 
blind therefore to the intellectual significance of Na- 
ture as affording it a necessary basis of evolution. If 
he has ever at all entertained the idea of creation as 
an attribute of the Divine perfection, he regards it 
at most as an explanation of existing things, or as 
accounting for the production of Nature, which he 
hence conceives as a work of God taking place in 



ILLUSORY GENESIS OF SELFHOOD. 277 

some pre-existing space and time, and finished at one 
or more successive coitps-de-main of the Divine archi- 
tect as his sacred traditions report. Thus nature, 
instead of being to his intellect the fertile evidence 
and argument of God's eternal spiritual activity, is 
the practical denial and stoppage of it when it once 
existed, interposing so far as the creature's faculties 
are concerned a dense wall of partition between him 
and God, instead of a transparent medium of com- 
munication. 

In the second place: being thus ignorant of the 
truth of a spiritual creation, and of nature's purely 
educative uses in subordination thereto, he is an 
every way apt pupil of his senses which stand ready 
to impose upon his nascent intelligence two immeas- 
urable and wellnigh inveterate fallacies. The first of 
which is : That Nature, or the great realm of uncon- 
scious life to which our senses give us our earliest 
introduction or initiation, exists only to sense, being 
finitely or materially constituted. And the second 
follows from this : In that Nature being thus finitely 
or materially constituted, every natural thing must be 
created in sheer independence of every other natural 
thing, and exist therefore on its own substantial basis, 
being its own absolute self, without obligation to, or 
necessary connection with, any other coexisting thing. 

In this way then, or by the mere and sheer docility 



278 EFFECT OF THE ILLUSION IN NECESSITATING 

of his intellect to his senses, the creature not only 
attains to the illusion of selfhood, or the feeling of life 
in himself absolutely, and irrespectively of all other 
men, but he also manages to maintain himself in that 
illusion, through every casualty and calamity to which 
an earthly lot engineered upon so shallow and treach- 
erous a basis, necessarily exposes him. And having 
these sensuous ideas of creation to begin with, the 
creature instinctively and unwittingly honors the Di- 
vine name in making it henceforth sensibly external 
and objective to the sphere of his own fallacious and 
fraudulent subjectivity. 

What is the effect on the creator of this stupidity 
on the part of the creature? Does He consent to 
abandon — as the creature would gladly have Him 
do — His essential spiritual primacy in all the realm 
of the created consciousness? Does He consent to 
forego, at His creature's bidding, His indefeasible 
spiritual supremacy over the creature? 

By no means. On the contrary, He enhances His 
spiritual hold upon the creature indefinitely, by frankly 
acquiescing in the banishment which the latter assid- 
uously imposes on Him, and obediently masking or 
concealing Himself henceforth in the lineaments of 
the created nature. For the creature as finite or con- 
scious subject can have no proper object but his 
unconscious nature. And if the creator consents to 



A DIVINE-NATURAL ORDER OF LIFE. 279 

identify Himself with this object, sinking all His 
spiritual activity in the endeavor to develop it, His 
spiritual hold upon the creature will only be indefi- 
nitely promoted in place of being abated. 

Let me make this point very clear to your under- 
standing, and thus do you the greatest philosophic 
service which one man may do another. In fact we 
are now arrived at the actual turning-point of dark 
to bright in the entire field of philosophic truth, and 
no cloud, if it be not a very passing one, will be able 
henceforward to obscure our good understanding. 

What I have said, then, I now repeat • 1. That the 
creator in submitting to the misappropriation of His 
creative being or substance by the creature to his own 
shallow self, is necessarily — in condescension to His 
creature's infirm understanding — forced out of an 
exclusively spiritual or subjective relation to the crea- 
ture, and obliged to occupy a purely natural or objec- 
tive and personal relation to him : and 2. That this 
purely adventitious or limitary manhood into which 
the creator finds Himself constrained by zeal for the 
creature's welfare, constitutes His own eternal spirit- 
ual glory, inasmuch as it affords Him his only oppor- 
tunity to come in contact with the sphere of evil in 
the creature (that is, the sphere of selfhood), and 
hence endows Him with all His ability to deliver 
the latter from its mortal coil and defilement. 



280 THIS ORDER ALONE RELEASES MAN FROM 

And now before proceeding to give you the rationale 
of this transcendent deliverance, allow me first to state 
precisely what is meant by the created nature, in con- 
tradistinction to the persons of that nature. 

By the abstract nature of a thing, then, we mean 
the relation of community existing between that thing 
and all other things embraced in its nature, in spite 
of their specific differences. So by the created nature 
I mean the relations of community — that is, of com- 
mon unity — necessarily existing between each and 
all creatures. Every creature claims to be in himself 
absolutely other than, or alien to, every other creature. 
Consequently, the nature of the creature imports, that 
in spite of these alleged personal, subjective, or abso- 
lute differences on the part of the creature, they have 
all a common unity : and is in fact itself the expres- 
sion and affirmation of such unity. Now, obviously, 
as all creatures claim to be in themselves, or subjec- 
tively, alien to every other, hence without personal 
unity with each other, this reciprocal natural unity 
which they exhibit cannot possibly inhere in them- 
selves, and so avouch itself a subjective or substantial 
unity, but must refer itself altogether to some foreign 
source, and so confess itself at best a purely formal 
or objective unity. Let us always remember therefore 
that the nature of the creature is obligatory upon him, 
and supremely obligatory. It does not express him, 



THE EVILS INCIDENT TO HIS SELFHOOD. 281 

but he expresses it. It does not derive from him, but 
he derives from it. He says for himself : "individual- 
ity or difference a outrance!' It says : " individuality 
or difference, to your heart's content indeed, as a final- 
ity ; but only in virtue of a previous natural commun- 
ity or identity keeping it eternally fresh and sweet." 
In short he is subject to his nature, and his nature is 
object or law to him. One cannot be subject to any- 
thing, without the thing being his master, without its 
turning out his sole object or supreme law ; nor conse- 
quently without his turning out its involuntary ser- 
vant ; that is, its slave. For in all natural or related 
existence it is the object which determines and con- 
trols the subject, and not, as the idealists foolishly 
hold, the subject which gives law to the object. It 
is indeed the object which altogether constitutes the 
subject, which makes it self-conscious, or seem to 
itself to be ; and never the latter which does this for 
the former : for the natural object is always uncon- 
scious, or undefined and without selfhood, towards 
the natural subject. To say in one word all that 
need be said : it is the object which alone is mother- 
substance to the subject, or endows it with appreciable 
body : so guaranteeing to it a fixed or constant natu- 
ral identity, whatever surprising enlargements may 
subsequently befall its spiritual individuality. 

It is plain now, I think, both what we mean when 



282 SUPERIORITY OF LIVING KNOWLEDGE 

we speak of the created nature, and what we mean 
when we speak of the created personality. By the 
former we express that thing which alone gives spir- 
itual reality or objectivity to the creature, in giving 
him constitutional or unconscious substance ; and we 
express by the latter that thing which alone stamps 
the creature with spiritual unreality or phenomenality, 
in giving him, not constitutional or unconscious sub- 
stance, but only conscious personal form. I say, to 
be sure, that thus much is plain, and I would will- 
ingly believe it to be so. But I confess I should 
like to make it much plainer by some fitting illus- 
tration derived from our natural experience ; which, 
in showing how invariably and absolutely primary 
the real or objective element in consciousness is to the 
phenomenal or subjective element, may also throw 
some illustrative light upon the great truth of the 
spiritual creation : the Divine Incarnation. 

Take, for example, any familiar fact of knowledge, 
say a horse. My living knowledge of the horse is 
direct and absolute, being given in sense. You may, 
if you like, divide this knowledge, for scientific pur- 
poses, into the two constitutional factors which it 
involves to your logical or reflective understanding, 
namely: 1. the horse, or object known; 2. the me, 
or subject knowing. But this scientific practice no- 
way modifies the living experience in question. It 



TO MEKE SCIENCE FOR CREATIVE ENDS. 283 

is obviously a mere logical analysis on your part of 
that living experience, by which you attempt reflec- 
tively or scientifically to resuscitate the body of 
knowledge after its soul has fled. Knowledge — and 
by knowledge, mind you, I mean knowledge in its 
true sense, as altogether actual or living ; as it is in- 
volved, indeed, in your mental constitution, and so 
becomes the basis of your subsequent spiritual or 
intellectual manhood ; and not any mere beggarly sci- 
ence, or learning, which is not living knowledge at 
all, but merely remembered or reflected knowledge, 
such as the people by a fine instinct stigmatize under 
the name of <5oo^-knowledge — knowledge, I say, is 
within its own precinct the living marriage of object 
and subject; and therefore, like all true marriage, 
annuls the possibility of their subsequent divorce. 
In livingly knowing the horse, for instance, I am 
wholly unconscious of, and indifferent to, any logical 
relation of object and subject subsisting between us. 
The only thing that survives of this merely logical 
and pedantic relation to my feeling, is the horse, or 
object known ; while I, the knowing subject, am in- 
continently licked up and disappear in his overpower- 
ing sensible reality. Life or consciousness, in other 
words, knows nothing of the relation, which is so 
vital to mere science or learning, of subject and 
object in existence as given in sense ; but indissolu- 



284 SCIENCE OR LEARNING FLATTERS 

bly blends, fuses, or marries them in its own mirac- 
ulous individuality. 

Thus life or consciousness — living knowledge or 
perception — defies analysis, or laughs it to scorn out 
of its own glorified personality. And its dissection 
consequently into object and subject is possible only 
when it has become a caput mortuum in your memory, 
or mental stomach, and been there reduced to pulp 
by the gastric juice of your ruminant or logical un- 
derstanding. When you resolve any living experi- 
ence into these purely logical constitutional factors, 
the result is very good logic no doubt, but is no 
longer life or experience. Just as when you chemi- 
cally resolve water into oxygen and hydrogen, the 
issue of your analysis is very good chemistry, but it 
is no longer water. Oxygen and hydrogen combined 
in definite proportions constitute the chemistry of 
water, or give it visible body. But they are a very 
long way indeed from constituting its characteristic 
activity, or giving it soul. Water claims both a physi- 
cal co-existence or identity with all other things ; and 
a spiritual power or individuality of its own, which 
differentiates it from all other things, and which all 
the untamed gases of the universe are unable either 
to supply or to explain. Oxygen and hydrogen per- 
fectly account for the physical constitution, or statical 
repose, of water. But they have no shadow of a 



THE ILLUSION OF SELFHOOD. 285 

pretension to account for its dynamic functioning, or 
the spiritual and life-giving power it specifically ex- 
erts over other existence. 

So object and subject no doubt constitute a very 
good logical analysis of any deceased fact of knowl- 
edge ; but they are heaven-wide of any pretension to 
constitute the least vital experience itself so-called. 
Knowledge is direct or miraculous, being given in 
sense or gratuitously ; while logic, or science, or learn- 
ing is indirect or reflective, being elaborately gener- 
ated by our reasonings upon the data of sense. You 
may talk logic and chemistry, consequently, " till all 
is blue," as the old people say : you are never in so 
doing talking towards life, but always steadfastly away 
from it. Philosophy laughs at your logic and your 
chemistry both alike, as inevitably predestined to come 
limping along a day after the fair, and spectrally revel 
upon the stale victuals and drink which have survived 
the joyous banquet of life. Science is never life. 
It is at most the moon-lit shadow of life projected 
upon our logical or reflective understanding ; and the 
method of the one is no less disproportionate to that 
of the other than earth is disproportionate to heaven. 
That is to say : in all living or conscious experience 
the logical or scientific distinction of object and sub- 
ject is utterly unknown, both the alleged factors being 
actually and indistinguishable/ one, and having no dis- 



286 THE OBJECT IN KNOWLEDGE GLORIFIES 

tinction but to your ruminant or reflective thought. 
Their unity, moreover, is not a simplistic but a strictly 
composite one, being fashioned in no foolish legal or 
voluntary way, but in a rigidly free or spontaneous 
manner. In short, the unity they realize is the hier- 
archical unity of marriage, in which the masculine or 
objective element is primary, commanding, active ; 
the feminine or subjective element secondary, sub- 
ordinate, passive. For example : in the living experi- 
ence just supposed — called knowledge — the subject 
is vivified exclusively by the object of knowledge : I 
myself having absolutely no power to know the horse 
but what is furnished me by the living animal him- 
self. Of course I might learn a good deal about the 
horse from books, from pictures, from hearsay ; but 
no amount of such learning could ever pretend to be 
convertible with an actual knowledge of the animal. 
Nothing is more common than for a very learned 
man to be a very unknowing one ; except, perhaps, 
than for a very knowing man to be a very unlearned 
one. If, indeed, learning should ever supersede 
knowledge or claim identity with it, the world would 
be in its dotage, and would wag infinitely worse I am 
persuaded than it has ever done hitherto. Learning 
or science is a capital handmaid of knowledge so 
long as she reveres her mistress, or does n't grow con- 
ceited of her own glittering livery. In that event it 



THE SUBJECT OUT OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS. 287 

is sure to be soon superseded by a more modest 
article. 

But to return to my subject. Horses might exist 
in any number and in great comfort all unknown to 
me. But in that case, of course, my existence as 
knowing subject would be so far curtailed. My ex- 
istence as a knowing subject does not the least date 
from any so-called faculty of knowledge I am sup- 
posed to possess — for, in point of fact, I know abso- 
lutely nothing by virtue of such alleged faculty — but 
exclusively from the objects my senses embrace : so 
that / can legitimately be held to know only in so far 
as objects exist to make me know. Take away, con- 
sequently, the object of knowledge (or thing known) 
as our logicians do when they resolve it into the 
sensations of the subject (or person knowing), and 
you a fortiori take away the subject : for the subject 
in existence is logically constituted only by the object 
for which and to which and by which he lives. 

This illustration drawn from our natural knowledge 
will show you what Nature thinks of the attempt to 
give the primacy of the object to the subject in any 
of her processes. For Nature manifestly stamps the 
objective element in all natural functioning the only 
real element, and the subjective element altogether 
unreal or fallacious and misleading independently of 
that. 



288 THE RULE OF OUR NATURAL KNOWLEDGE 

But the specific use I wish to make of this illustra- 
tion is to shed light upon the fundamental method of 
creation, or the Divine Incarnation in human nature. 
Accordingly let us now attempt to show that what 
we have found to be the rule of our natural knowl- 
edge is really the rule also of our natural life. 

In the first place, then, remember, most distinctly, 
the topic w T e are discussing — human nature ; that is 
to say, the nature, not of minerals, nor of vegetables, 
nor of animals, but of men. No doubt the nature 
of these lower existences, if they have any nature, is 
included in that of man,* but their nature is anything 
but human nature. Human nature is a strict subli- 
mation or evolution from all lower physical forms, by 
virtue of man containing an essential Divine or infi- 
nite element, which they do not contain. But then 
it would be very illogical to argue that because a 
certain thing was evolved from another thing, it was 
therefore at all identical with that thing. Its evolu- 

* By the " nature " of these existences one can only mean their spe- 
cific possibilities ; inasmuch as the nature of things, strictly speaking, 
expresses their universal and unitary form, and mineral, vegetable, and 
animal existences expressly deny and reject the imputation of such a 
form. Tliey cannot be classed as natural existences, accordingly, save 
in so far as they are comprehended in human nature, of which they are 
so many discordant and conflicting types revealed to sense, and furnish- 
ing therefore an inestimably precious basis to man's natural knowledge, 
and through that to his spiritual experience. 



THE RULE OF OUR NATURAL LIFE. 289 

tion from it only proves it to have been — not identi- 
cal with it, but distinctly and totally different from 
it ; as different in fact as heaven is from earth. 

And then having thus in the first place remembered 
that our sole subject is human nature, do me the 
favor in the second place to bear in mind what I have 
said about human nature being altogether objectively 
constituted, or obeying a certain spiritual end. Men 
commonly hold to their nature being altogether sub- 
jectively constituted : that is, constituted by its proper 
subjects. In other words, they deny that their nature 
is vitalized by any spiritual Divine end, and hold that 
it is a term designed merely to express the total con- 
tents of men's actual subjectivities. So that if I were 
to put the question to a thousand men chosen at ran- 
dom : What does human nature mean ? I doubt not 
that nine hundred and ninety-nine of them would reply: 
It means the outcome and aggregate of all men's pri- 
vate personalities, of every man's subjective or limi- 
tary experience. But this answer would be wholly 
unintelligent, for it would allow no discrimination 
between our undefined nature and our finite person- 
alities. Men's personalities on the one hand are all 
that they have within them of most finite and par- 
ticular ; while their nature on the other hand is all 
that there is within them of most indefinite and uni- 
versal. There is to be sure any amount of particulars 



290 OUR NATURE — WHAT? 

included in a universal ; but no amount of such par- 
ticulars, were the amount great enough to comprise all 
the particulars beneath the sky, would ever avail by 
themselves to constitute a universal. For universals 
and particulars make two distinctly different genera 
or kinds, and hence in themselves, or essentially, are 
as reciprocally conflicting and inconvertible as truth 
and fact, wisdom and knowledge, love and self- 
love, heaven and earth, are in themselves. That 
is to say : the logical difference between a universal 
and its particulars is not a quantitative difference, but 
exclusively a qualitative one, being the exact differ- 
ence of substance and form.* We men undoubtedly 
furnish the finite perishable stuff of human nature, or 
the material substance which the indwelling Divine 
life in us moulds into immortal spiritual form, just as 
the marble furnishes the perishable material substance 
of the statue. But we have quite as little share in 
giving our nature form, as the marble has in giving 
ideal form to the statue. 

No, the form of our nature, or its distinctive qual- 

* " Spiritual thought," says Swedenborg (de Divind Sapientia, No. 5, 
in the 6th volume of Apocalypsis Explicata), "is altogether unlike 
natural thought, so much unlike that spiritual ideas transcend natural 
ideas, and cannot be made to coalesce with them save in the way of an 
interior rational perception : this rational perception taking place no 
otherwise than by abstracting or removing quantities from qualities" 



AND HOW CONSTITUTED? 291 

ity — apart from which it has no cognizable existence, 
being sunk in the abject slime of our disunited or war- 
ring personalities — is wholly derived from its objec- 
tive element, or the uses it subserves to the evolution 
in us of a Divine-natural manhood. The technical 
" church," ending in the life, death, and resurrection 
of Jesus Christ, has been throughout history a witness 
of this coming glorification of our nature. But the 
church has always misconceived its own mission. It 
has always conceived its mission to lie — not simply 
in bearing witness to the miraculous facts of Christ's 
career — but much more, in converting these miracu- 
lous facts into so many spiritual truths which men are 
bound to receive solely upon its own dogmatic author- 
ity. There could not be in the nature of things a 
more unfounded and undivine pretension than this. 
Men gratefully receive and confide in the church's 
testimony in regard to all the literal Christian facts, 
whether ordinary or miraculous, but especially the 
miraculous ones — because, as I have said before, 
miracle is the only evidence and sanction of a Divine 
revelation which a carnal or sensuous mind is capable 
of receiving. But when the church assumes now as 
of old to be the authorized interpreter of these facts 
to the intellect of men, and to impose her authority 
upon them as final, she cannot fail to provoke a revolt 
whose only issue must be the acknowledgment of her 



292 THE CHURCH'S TESTIMONY 

utter spiritual triviality and imbecility. The Chris- 
tian facts are of inestimable value to the intellect 
in furnishing a fixed immovable basis to thought 
in reference to Divine things, and hence a guide to 
speculation in reference to the developments of human 
destiny; and all modest and reasonable minds, as I 
conceive, will be prompt to bless the church accord- 
ingly for the signally pointed and consistent testi- 
mony she has always borne to these facts amidst the 
darkness, indifference, and conflict of men's opinions. 
But I must say that no independent mind cares a jot 
for the church's traditional judgment of the Divine 
and human meaning (that is, the strictly intellectual 
meaning) which has always been latent in the facts, 
and so marvellously adapts them to our nascent spir- 
itual intelligence. In fact one would be inclined to 
rate the judgment of any honest living mind in all 
that line of inquiry, as of vastly superior worth. 

Every one will admit that the church, in thus at- 
testing the integrity of the Christian facts, has played 
a vitally important part in the education of the human 
mind ; but I maintain, moreover, that this attesting 
function of the church has furnished her only true 
claim to men's respect, a claim infinitely transcending 
that based upon her usurped dogmatic authority. 
There is no function in life half so honorable or 
venerable to the heart of man as that of a nursing 



TO THE CHRISTIAN FACTS. 293 

mother ; and this is the exact relation which the 
church was meant to stand in towards the mind. 
She had nothing to do but administer the pure milk 
of the Gospel to her offspring, leaving its spiritual 
assimilation by them, and its subsequent conversion 
into good solid intellectual flesh and bone, to the ex- 
quisite providence which watched with like assiduity 
over it and them. When I was a tender babe on 
my mother's knee, feeling as yet no personal con- 
sciousness beyond the cravings of my insatiate little 
stomach, it would have been an egregious outrage to 
my intellectual innocence to have put upon me also 
the providence and preparation of my needful food. 
Now the intellect, in its infancy, is nothing else than 
a mental stomach, or ravenous memory, which craves 
nothing but a fixed motherly lap of knowledge to 
cradle and nourish its nascent powers, until such time 
as it is fit to enter for itself upon the administration 
of its spiritual heritage. How sheerly preposterous, 
therefore, would it be to expect it — as our twittering 
" free-religionists " do — to sit in judgment upon the 
food of succulent knowledge thus presented to it, and 
critically determine whether it be true or false, fit or 
unfit, before its small high mightiness deigns to re- 
ceive it ! With precisely equal propriety you might 
expect the child to sit in judgment on its mother's 
milk, and decide before receiving it whether it be the 



294 THE REALM OF FACT INFERIOR 

distillation of a chaste or an unchaste bosom. What 
a prodigy of nastiness would you make of the inno- 
cent child at his maturity, in the one case ! And 
what an essentially petty and pedantic role must you 
suppose the intellect destined to fulfil at its maturity, 
in the other ! 

I confess for my part that I should as soon think 
of spitting upon my mother's grave, or offering any 
other offence to her stainless memory, as of question- 
ing any of the Gospel facts. And this, not because I 
regard them as literally or absolutely true — for the 
whole realm of fact is as far beneath that of truth, as 
earth is beneath heaven — but simply because they 
furnish the indispensable word, or master-key, to our 
interpretation of God's majestic revelation of Himself 
in human nature. When accordingly I am asked 
whether I believe in the literal facts of Christ's birth 
from a virgin, his resurrection from death, his ascen- 
sion into heaven, and so forth, I feel constrained to 
reply : That I neither believe in them nor disbelieve, 
because the sphere of fact is the sphere of men's 
knowledge, exclusively, and therefore invites neither 
belief nor disbelief ; but that I have a most profound, 
even a heartfelt, conviction of the truth which they, 
and they alone, reveal, namely, the truth of God's 
essentially human perfection, and, as implied in that, 
the amazing truth of His natural or adventitious man- 



TO THE REALM OF TRUTH. 295 

hood : which conviction keeps me blessedly indifferent 
to, and utterly unvexed by, the cheap and frivolous 
scepticism with which so many of our learned modern 
pundits assail them. I have not the least reverence 
nor even respect for the facts in question, save as 
basing or ultimating this grand creative or spiritual 
truth ; and while the truth stands to my apprehension, 
I shall be serenely obdurate to the learned reason- 
ings of any of my contemporaries in regard to the 
facts, whether pro or con. I know, to be sure, all 
that the sceptics know about them, that is, that they 
have come down to us from apparently honest and 
intelligent men, who themselves knew, or thought 
they knew, them to have occurred as they are reported 
to us. But, unlike the sceptics, I am content and 
more than content to receive the facts upon the testi- 
mony of these simple men, because they appeal so 
strongly to my heart, or seem to be the homely and 
harmless anchorage or ultimate of most vital and 
otherwise unattainable Divine knowledge. If Christ 
and his apostles had professed the desire and inten- 
tion to convey mere stupid scientific knowledge to 
men : that is, the knowledge that precedes regeneration, 
and is wholly independent of it: the great mass of 
mankind would have remained forever deaf to their 
teaching, for there is happily no Divine thirst in men 
after scientific information ; and I for one would cheer- 



296 UNHAPPY RESULTS TO THE INTELLECT 

fully leave them in that case to the tender mercies 
of any ambitious scavenger who might enhance his 
own reputation with unintelligent people by throwing 
scientific mud at them. But as they did n't at all 
profess this commonplace ambition, — as their sole 
desire was to commend to men a new and living reve- 
lation of God, based upon a spiritual creation of man, 
i. e. upon affections and thoughts in men deeper than 
those which they inherit from their past ancestry, 
or derive from the little world of consciousness and 
convention about them, I see no reason why we should 
not regard the malignant criticism they receive at the 
hands of our popular scientific scribes, as a virtual 
confession on the part of these latter that they know 
nothing of, and are signally incompetent to, the merits 
of the question they have undertaken to discuss. 

But, in addition to all this, I have no hesitation 
in avowing that I for my part am thoroughly sick 
and tired of regulating my intellectual life on any 
principle of scientific certitude, because this in the 
long run is to make sense the arbiter of the mind. 
No doubt man is by creation both internal and ex- 
ternal, and his voluntary or rational mind, which 
intervenes between the two discordant spheres and 
enables him eventually to harmonize their interests, 
may doubtless determine itself towards either interest 
in preference to the other. But I am persuaded 



IN TETHERING IT TO SENSE. 297 

that if it determine itself towards science or the 
senses, the result to one's spiritual understanding 
cannot help being disastrous in the extreme. I am 
sure at all events that it would be to the last degree 
disastrous in my own case. For science takes no 
cognizance but of finite existence. To what exists 
infinitely or in itself, and is therefore undiscerned 
and unauthenticated by the senses, she is as blind 
and deaf as the stone. And consequently if I 
should allow my intellectual life to be ruled by 
science, I should cease to have any intellectual life 
left. Tor one's intellect is the child of a double 
parentage, the offspring of a marriage-union between 
goodness and truth. But goodness is essentially 
invisible and incognizable to sense, being infinite, 
and therefore altogether livingly or spiritually dis- 
cerned. The only good that the senses recognize 
is a finite good, a good limited by evil. And even 
truth is never discerned by the senses in direct or 
positive, but always in indirect or inverse form. 
My intellect accordingly, if it should succumb to 
the limitations of science, or deliberately submit 
itself to the arbitrament of sense, would virtually 
renounce the whole of its characteristic life, which 
lies in a heartfelt surrender to infinite goodness and 
truth, and is compatible with no other or lesser 
instinct. In fact, I should be incapable in that case 



298 



ATTITUDE OF MEN OF SCIENCE. 



of believing in truth at all save under the guise 
of a probability. For scientific certainty is never a 
certainty of what is infinitely true, i. e. true in it- 
self, but only of what is true to our intelligence, 
i. e. of what is merely phenomenally true, or prob- 
able, and may therefore be denied even all prob- 
ability to-morrow. What an intolerable bondage 
this would be to the intellect, to have the heart's 
capacity of belief limited by the grovelling senses ! 
It would be the blighting of human nature at its 
very root, or its reduction to less even than bestial 
freedom and innocence ! Such, moreover, I am per- 
suaded is the practical attitude at this day of all 
genuine men of science. They are none of them 
livingly ruled by science, or submit the life of their 
intellect to its unwise and impertinent stewardship. 
They all — unless they are men of unworthy lives 
to begin with, which is a supposition not to be 
thought of in reference to any sincere devotee of 
science — firmly believe in a good whose existence 
science is totally impotent on her own principles 
either to affirm or deny, and they none of them 
believe even in a truth which the senses by them- 
selves are competent to confirm, or which they do 
not become qualified to confirm solely by having 
undergone the previous discipline and correction of 
the intellect. 



DIFFERENCE BETWEEN SCIENCE AND FAITH. 299 

The long and the short of the whole matter is 
that what men call true in science, is not the truth 
they intellectually or spiritually apprehend. The 
two orders of truth differ fundamentally, one being 
based in sensible experience, the experience com- 
mon to the race, and not worth a jot but as in- 
volving it; the other originating in inward percep- 
tion, and claiming therefore a rigidly individual 
ground or basis. Thus the law of universal gravi- 
tation — the law which imports that all the bodies 
of the universe attract each other with a force 
directly proportioned to the mass of matter they 
contain, and inversely proportioned to the squares 
of their distances — is a scientific truth, that is, one 
whose existence depends upon its strict universality, 
or its involving all things in its grasp whether they 
know it or not. And the truth of the Divine be- 
ing and existence — the truth which imports that 
all men are derivative or created existences, and 
enjoy therefore a strictly fallacious life in themselves 
— is an intellectual or spiritual truth, but it is a 
truth which falls wholly within consciousness. That 
is to say, this truth unlike the other is never the 
interpretation of men's common or outward experi- 
ence, but is a result exclusively of their inward cul- 
ture or refining. No man believes it in virtue of any 
force of intellect he possesses, still less in virtue of 



300 THE GOSPEL UNTRUE TIDINGS TO EVERY 

any degree of natural goodness or gentleness he is 
born to. Every man, who believes it at all, — that 
is, who believes it not as a mere hereditary tradition, 
but with his spirit or life, — believes it as the effect 
of a decided inward discipline, or genuine individual 
culture, awakening a heart-craving for it, i. e. telling 
him that it is supremely good to believe it, that for 
him indeed eternal death and damnation lie in his 
not believing it; and in comparison therefore with this 
most excellent knowledge, the science or learning of 
all worlds is as the small dust of the balance in his 
sight. In other words : every one who believes it 
does so with the heart first, and the intellect after- 
wards : that is, believes it primarily as good, and not 
as truth. This, and this alone, is why I believe any 
Divine truth • because my heart fiercely hungers after 
it, and stamps every thing false and foul that con- 
flicts — or even comes into passing rivalry — with it. 
What does it matter to me that some cold-blooded 
prig or pedant is able to demonstrate the scientific 
untruth of my belief? Have I ever pretended that 
it had any scientific basis or justification ? Do I not 
know in all my bones that the tendency of science, 
and the whole current of men's servile opinion, run 
directly counter to it ? Do you think that I love 
it any the less on that account? Do you think 
that my fierce relish for it is not all the while 



ONE WHO DOES NOT FIRST FIND IT GOOD. 301 

quickened and fomented by this popular and scien- 
tific indifference to it ? Or that the gainsaying of 
it by all the world, vulgar and polite, would have 
any other effect upon me than driving me joyfully 
to die for it? And I should like to know what 
man ever went to death for a scientific truth. Gali- 
leo, I believe, declined to do so, and for the very 
good reason no doubt that he did not feel his 
highest life involved in any truth of science. Other- 
wise he could have hardly rejected the auspicious 
opportunity offered him by the church of his day, 
to assert and signally illustrate that life. " Scien- 
tific untruth of my belief," indeed ! Words are not 
able to express my joy that men's belief has no 
scientific basis, that is, no basis in their sensible 
experience, because then my heart and mind would 
depend for their beggarly life upon the heart and 
mind of other men, and I should have no direct 
inspiration from Him who now fills me with these 
fragrant tides of love and joy and worship. 

We may say in fact, that nowhere in Christen- 
dom, outside the professing Christian church, do we 
find the human mind backward to admit that its 
allegiance is due primarily to good, and only deriv- 
atively to truth. The revelation in Jesus Christ of 
God's incarnate perfection may be called the definite 
inauguration of the heart's sole authority thenceforth 



302 MAN'S ALLEGIANCE HENCEFORTH DUE 

in the sphere of belief. His manifestation in Christ 
as a natural man, even in ultimates or personal form, 
that is, down to the assumption of flesh and bones, 
and His consequent exaltation of human nature itself 
out of limitary into universal dimensions, so making 
it thenceforth the only true measure of infinitude, 
appeals for sanction to the heart's deepest instincts 
of Divine good, and disclaims the superficial hom- 
age of the intellect, save in so far as the intellect 
itself is shaped and enlarged by the experience of the 
heart. For the heart is what alone universalizes 
man to the dimensions of his kind, and unites him 
with it, while the intellect, fed by sense, restricts him 
to the most meagre personal form, or divides him 
from it. The heart alone consequently is capable of 
acknowledging a Divine or universal truth, and the 
intellect derives all its capacity of similar acknowl- 
edgment from it. Now unquestionably human na- 
ture embraces all that man is capable of recognizing 
as Divine good ; and Jesus Christ accordingly in 
revealing to the faith of his disciples the Divine 
and human unity, that is, the truth of God's inti- 
mate and perfect natural humanity, has forever 
exalted good to the sovereignty of human affection, 
and relegated truth to a comparatively inferior or 
subordinate place. Every man of intellect and con- 
science feels, accordingly, by an indomitable Divine 



TO DIVINE-NATURAL GOOD ALONE. 303 

instinct of the truth, that his own particular nature 
is not human nature, but rather a caricature of it; 
feels that it is shockingly inhuman in fact, because 
its universal element, or what relates him to the 
neighbor, is so inactive or poorly developed com- 
pared with its personal or individual element, which 
relates him to self. Every man, in other words, of 
spiritual or living culture throughout history has 
felt his particular nature to be unmixed evil, has 
felt in very truth that he himself was no man, and 
has always appealed to God consequently with tears 
of penitence and humiliation, as his only hope and 
succor against himself. Thus Jesus Christ in iden- 
tifying man's religious aspiration with the redemption 
and salvation of human nature from the evils inci- 
dent to every man's particular nature, and its con- 
sequent eternal union with the Divine infinitude, 
has exalted religion itself out of a wretched ritual 
or ceremonial worship, into the diligent handmaiden 
and minister of every man's unadulterate natural 
good. 



LETTER XXII, 




Y DEAR FRIEND : — I have been digress- 
ing sadly, and must forthwith return to 
my thesis. I was saying, when my pen 
took another direction, that the form of 
human nature, or its distinctive quality, apart from 
which it has no real existence, is derived wholly from 
its objective element, or the uses it subserves to the 
evolution in the earth of a Divine-natural manhood. 
And I have certainly no desire to divert your atten- 
tion from this statement, since all our intellectual 
accord depends upon your doing full and frank 
justice to it. For the uses referred to constitute the 
sole actual presence of God in our nature, being all 
spiritually fulfilled in the nature coming to form, or, 
what is the same thing, in the advent of a perfect 
society, fellowship, or equality of all men with each 
and of each man with all men, on earth or in heaven. 
The technical Christian church in simply bearing wit- 
ness to the gospel facts, has unconsciously but un- 



THE STATE CULMINATES IN THE REPUBLIC. 305 

falteringly ministered to these providential uses in 
nurturing and giving birth to the Christian state, 
which is the initial objective or actual form under 
which God's spiritual incarnation in our nature be- 
comes realized. The rudiment of the State under all 
its forms, even the most expanded, is the marriage 
institution, engendering the family unity. For out of 
this small unit of the family grows successively the 
larger unities of the tribe, or unity of many fami- 
lies ; of the city, or unity of many tribes ; of the 
nation, or unity of many cities ; and finally of the 
republic, or unity of many nations. These successive 
political structures have been only the material scaf- 
folding by means of which God's spiritual edifice in 
human nature has gradually worked itself out to 
men's recognition ; and accordingly, now that the full 
daylight of Divine truth is upon us, they only spirit- 
ually obscure what they once obediently promoted. 
For their pretension is (and in this pretension they 
are diligently backed by a mercenary and menda- 
cious church) that they do not constitute the mere 
provisional scaffolding of God's great edifice in hu- 
man nature, but the very edifice itself; and they 
consequently influence men's minds to every down- 
ward base issue, instead of inflaming them to noble 
upright endeavors and aspirations. But, as I have 
said, all these political structures attain to their 



306 THE REPUBLIC ENDS OUR POLITICAL LIFE. 

climax and culmination in the republic, whence 
their decline becomes swift and eternal. The rea- 
son why the republic is necessarily the final form 
of God's institutional or educative providence in 
human affairs, is because the republic makes it im- 
possible to realize any larger literal order among 
men, any more expansive form of merely instituted 
or enforced fellowship among them, and so inevita- 
bly gives way itself at last to a free spontaneous 
society, or a spiritual unforced fellowship of each 
and all men, as the supreme development of human 
destiny, because such a destiny alone befits man's 
human or God-given nature. And the reason why 
the republic makes it impossible to conceive of any 
larger literal form of Divine administration on earth, 
is that the republic is the government of the people 
by chosen representatives of the people, without ref- 
erence to smaller political or customary divisions. 
And surely nothing larger in the way of literal ad- 
ministrative rule can be imagined than a government 
whose only sanction is the will of the whole people. 

Thus the republic inaugurates a change from a 
literal or seeming order to a spiritual or real one in 
the Divine administration of human life. Now what 
is the exact distinction here announced? What is 
the exact difference between spirit and letter, between 
reality and appearance, between a universal and a 



THE ANGELS AN IMPERFECT WORK OF GOD. 307 

partial order? And what is the necessary ground 
of such distinction in the Divine economy? Why 
does the Divine housekeeping in our nature admit, 
nay prescribe and exact this immense difference in 
things? If we come to a good understanding on 
this point, we shall be likely to disagree on no other. 
The difference in question, then, is the exact dif- 
ference between a regimen of good enforced by the 
heart, and one of truth enforced by the intellect. 
That is to say : it is the difference between inward, 
free, spontaneous action on the one hand, and out- 
ward, voluntary, prudential, or deliberate action on 
the other. If indeed your ear were broken in to 
a logical distinction which Swedenborg's necessities 
constantly compel him to make, I could more briefly 
define the difference by saying that literal order is 
motived by a sentiment of duty in its subject, and 
spiritual order by a sentiment of delight. Thus the 
exact difference involved is that between our moral 
and our aesthetic culture : between the life of obedi- 
ence to truth in his intellect which a man lives in 
preparation for his regeneration, and which is always 
a life of more or less painful death to himself, and 
that which he lives from the inspiration of good in 
his heart, after his regeneration is complete. Swe- 
denborg found the regeneration of the angels very 
incomplete, apparently because the doctrine of the 



308 SWEDENBORG'S INDICTMENT OF 

Lord, that is, of the Divine assumption and glorifica- 
tion of human nature, had so little spiritual recogni- 
tion among them. Their regeneration was the fruit of 
moral culture, or obedience to law, involving of course 
more or less self-denial ; whereas the fundamental 
idea of Christianity is the redemption of man's nature 
to God, or the making him spontaneously regenerate, 
regenerate through natural taste or attraction. Swe- 
denborg represents the angels, accordingly, as in- 
debted exclusively to the restraining influences of the 
Divine power, that they do not rush headlong into 
infernal evil. For in regeneration the evil is never 
separated from man, but is only rendered innocuous 
or quiescent, so as actually to appear annihilated, 
when really it is not at all so. Such is the state of 
the angels. So far as their own knowledge goes, 
they do not know but that they are separated from 
evil, but in truth they are only providentially re- 
strained from it, which makes their evil quiescent 
and apparently annihilates it. But this sejiaration is 
only an appearance, which the angels themselves dis- 
cover upon reflection.* In short it is Swedenborg's 
uniform testimony that the selfhood in angels no less 
lhan in men is altogether false and evil.f Doubt on 
this point, he says, disqualifies a man for heavenly so- 
ciety. Indeed I might cite any number of passages 

* Arcana Calestia, 1581. f Ibid -> 633 - See also 68L 



THE ANGELIC PERSONALITY. 309 

from his books in which he profoundly affronts our most 
inveterate ecclesiastical superstitions, by reporting that 
the angels of themselves or of their own nature bear 
a very sinister relation to goodness and truth, just as 
sinister a one as any of the infernals. 

I think this a very serious indictment of the an- 
gelic personality, as that personality is ordinarily 
conceived by us, and well worthy of men's philo- 
sophic scrutiny. " There is with man no understand- 
ing of truth, nor any will of goodness : but when he 
becomes a denizen of heaven, it appears as if he 
possesses these things, when nevertheless he knows, 
acknowledges, and perceives that they are of the 
Lord alone. " These possessions are in fact the posi- 
tive presence of God in him, constituting all he shall 
ever really know of God. Never was a doctrine 
propounded by living man, more revolting to flesh 
and blood than this. And yet the wise old man 
was so devoted to it, heart and mind, and brings 
such an amazing amount of striking experience, ob- 
servation, and angelic testimony to corroborate it, 
that it cannot fail some day to attract the attention 
of philosophic minds. The so-called " Swedenbor- 
gians " may be left out of our account altogether : 
for these preposterous people are so bent upon adding 
another to the Christian sects by devoutly playing 
" New Church " and " New Jerusalem " every Sun- 



310 HE SHOWS IT SEVERELY MINISTERIAL 

day to complacent handfuls of men and women, and 
so trying to impose upon the world the fiction that 
Swedenborg himself is an accomplice of the stu- 
pidity, that they actually do nothing but disgust all 
right-minded men with his books. But how many 
fairly honest and competent minds nowadays, think 
you, minds freed from sectarian sottishness, and 
hating the influence of the sects upon the world as 
they hate the jaws of hell, have recourse to these 
modest volumes to find a clew out of our gathering 
political and social perplexities ? Their number 
might almost be counted on the fingers. Yet I am 
fully persuaded that such men will find intellectual 
relief nowhere else; and nowhere in Swedenborg 
half so readily as in thoroughly mastering the truth 
that we are now canvassing, namely : the truth of 
man's (and hence the angel's) limited freedom or 
selfhood. 

I said however just now that no truth could be 
more revolting to our " flesh and blood " personality, 
or the pride of individuality in us, than this. Clearly 
this effect is owing to the immense natural illusion 
we are under in respect to our flesh-and-blood per- 
sonality. For a very long while this personality 
constitutes literally all we know of life. The whole 
realm of sense is its appanage either as ministering 
to our material support, or as serving our varied fac- 



TO A WORK OF GOD IN HUMAN NATURE. 311 

ulties of intelligence. In our ignorance and inex- 
perience of any higher or truer life, what wonder is 
it then that we should deem ourselves the best re- 
sult of God's creative power, and look upon life as 
absolutely our own? And yet the whole persuasion 
is a downright fallacy. There is absolutely no such 
thing in nature as a finite selfhood or an indepen- 
dent personality. The conception of such an exist- 
ence belongs wholly to our own crazy way of en- 
visaging creation, that is, regarding it primarily as a 
material or quantitative result, rather than a spiritual 
or qualitative one. We are taught to call God in- 
finite to be sure, but only because we have been first 
taught to call ourselves finite. In reality, however, 
we deem God the most finite of beings, the most 
essentially absolute or independent of beings. This 
is our own ideal of human perfection, or the mode 
of existence we most aspire to for ourselves ; and it 
is not marvellous therefore that we attribute the 
full enjoyment of it to God our creator. Endowing 
the creature as we do in imagination with his own 
inward life or being, we necessarily relegate God to 
an exclusively outward position towards him, and 
thus are compelled to finite the creator by all the 
breadth of creation. In short, notwithstanding our 
vague and crude ascriptions of a nominal infinitude 
to Him, we really or in thought make Him, as I 



312 MAN'S PRIVATE SELFHOOD THE ONLY 

have said, the most finite or restricted of beings, 
and rob Him of His rightful infinitude the better 
to adorn our factitious selves with it. But I do not 
hesitate for my own part utterly to scout this mate- 
rialistic hypothesis of the relation between creator 
and creature as having no ground in the essential 
truth of the case. 

I do not hesitate, for example, to express my con- 
viction that the distinction between creature and 
creator is not the least a sensible or objective fact, 
but a purely rational or subjective truth. It is not 
at all true that man presents any antagonism with 
the infinite in his outward or public and universal 
aspect, that is, as an organic subject, or subject of 
sense ; but only in his inward, private, or particular 
aspect as an inorganic subject, or subject of conscious- 
ness. My physical organization which passively 
unites me with the universal realm of existence, ob- 
viously does not disunite me with the creator, since 
in that case I should cease to live, because I am 
essentially a created existence; but only my meta- 
physical or inorganic consciousness by which I am 
actively isolated or differentiated from all other men. 
If my divorce from God were real or objective as 
well as conscious or subjective — if it were a fact 
of physics as well as a truth of metaphysics — then 
it would be impossible for me to enjoy a vital sen- 



INVETERATE ENEMY OF GOD. 313 

sation; for I have not the presumption to suppose 
that I myself constitute my sensitive life : that is, 
that I myself contribute a particle of force to my 
seeing or hearing or smelling or tasting or touching 
faculty. I am in truth as passive in all the range 
of my sensuous experience as the child is in partu- 
rition. That is to say, I see, hear, smell, taste, touch, 
not by virtue of the slightest conceivable exertion 
of personal power on my part, but by virtue of a 
marvellous inherited organization which fuses in itself 
the two conflicting realms of a wide universality and 
a narrow particularity, and thereby renders me a 
conscious person. It would not be a whit less silly 
accordingly in me to take credit to myself for my 
physical endowments, than it would be in a child to 
take credit to itself for its own generation. In short 
my finite or imperfect personality is itself a sheer 
outbirth and dependency of an organization which 
combines and expresses in itself the grossest univer- 
sality and the subtlest individuality; and I conse- 
quently realize my personality as finite or imperfect, 
only because I am persistently blind to the grandeur 
of that organization as a universal symbol, or look 
upon it solely as a private or specific and not as a 
generic or race possession. 

Understand, then, that our alienation from or other - 
ness to our creator is not the least a demonstrable 



314 IS OUK NATURAL ALIENATION FROM 



fact of science, implying a sensible or real estrange- 
ment between us. On the contrary it is a strict 
truth of consciousness — a fruit of our purely met- 
aphysical or subjective illusion — implying on our 
part doubtless a certain phenomenal projection from 
the creator whereby we become ^^-constituted, be- 
come personally conscious, but arguing no particle 
of essential antagonism, or absolute remoteness be- 
tween us. In other words our felt finiteness is no 
way a law of our spiritual creation, or of the infinite 
and eternal being we possess in God, but only and 
at most an incident of our natural constitution, or 
of the limited and transient existence we possess in 
rigid community with all other men. Thus, all I 
mean to say is that the finiting principle in human 
life, the evil principle, is invariably that of selfhood 
or private personality ; while the infiniting principle, 
the good principle consequently, is invariably that of 
society, or the broadest possible fellowship, equality, 
brotherhood, of man and man. And creation will 
never be spiritually or philosophically appreciable to 
us until we take to heart this discrimination. 

As well as I can remember, in fact, the spring of 
all my intellectual activity in the past was to know 
for certain whether our felt finiteness was a necessity 
of our spiritual creation, or simply an incident of our 
natural constitution : whether, for example, it was to 



GOD, A FACT OF SCIENCE? 315 

be interpreted as having been arbitrarily imposed 
upon us by the Divine will, or as inherent merely in 
the sentiment we so inordinately cherish of personal 
independence. For in the former case my hope in 
God necessarily dies out by the practical decease of 
His infinitude, while in the latter case it is not only 
left unimpaired but is revived and invigorated. If 
my felt finiteness be a necessity of my creatureship, 
that is to say, if the creative perfection necessitate 
the creature's imperfection in any real and not a 
simply logical sense; then clearly the creative per- 
fection is only nominal, not real, is only a compara- 
tive, not a positive, perfection : and a creator whose 
perfection is of this finite sort only, may be worthy 
indeed of a certain respect as addressing my fear, 
but is so far from attracting my adoring hope and 
love as to be much more likely to provoke my en- 
ergetic distrust and aversion. But if on the other 
hand my felt finiteness be a mere suggestion or 
affirmation of the natural mind in me, evidencing 
only the dense ignorance every man is specifically 
under with respect to the true spirituality of his na- 
ture, or its latent divinity, then of course the senti- 
ment I cherish of the creative greatness will become 
so much the more aggrandized and expansive as I 
perceive His immortal bounty toward us to suspend 
itself not upon any foolish and violent castration, 



316 OR IS IT A TRUTH OF OUR 

so to speak, of our vain and flippant and conceited 
intelligence, but rather upon such an unlimited im- 
pregnation of its ignorance and falsity by His own 
wholesome and healing truth as cannot fail in the 
end to make us naturally wise with His infinite and 
eternal wisdom. 

Here, in fact, was the veritable secret source of 
all my intellectual unrest. During all my early in- 
tellectual existence I was haunted by so keen a 
sense of God's natural incongruity with me — of his 
natural and therefore invincible alienation, otherness, 
externality, distance, remoteness to me — as to 
breed in my bosom oftentimes a wholly unspeakable 
heartsickness or homesickness. The sentiment to be 
sure masked its ineffable malignity from my per- 
ception under the guise of an alleged supernatural 
limitation on God's part ; but it none the less filled 
my soul with the tremor and pallor of death. I 
have no doubt indeed that if it had not been for 
my excessive " animal spirits " as we say, or the 
extreme good-will I felt towards sensuous pleasure 
of every sort, which alternated my morbid conscien- 
tiousness and foiled its corrosive force, I should have 
turned out a flagrant case of arrested intellectual 
development. I could have borne very well, mind 
you, a conviction of God's personal antipathy to me 
carried to any pitch you please ; for my person does 



PERSONAL CONSCIOUSNESS MERELY? 317 

not go with my nature as man, and a personal con- 
demnation therefore which should not cut me off 
from a natural resurrection, would not deprive me 
of hope toward God. But my conviction of God's 
personal alienation had been hopelessly saddled, 
through the incompetency of my theologic sponsors, 
with the senseless tradition of His inveterate es- 
trangement also from human nature. Thus unhap- 
pily although my person did not go with human 
nature they made human nature to go with my 
person, or managed so perfectly to confound the two 
things to my unpractised sense, that whenever I felt 
a superficial or intrinsically evanescent pang of mere 
personal remorse, it was sure to pass by a quick dia- 
bolical chemistry into a sense of the deadliest natural 
hostility between me and the source of my life. 

It is in fact this venomous tradition of a natural 
as well as a personal disproportion between man and 
his maker — speciously cloaked as it is under the 
ascription of a supernatural being and existence to 
God — that alone gives its intolerable odium and 
poignancy to men's otherwise healthful and restora- 
tive conscience of sin. That man's personality should 
utterly alienate him from God — that is to say, make 
him infinitely other and opposite to God — this I 
grant you with all my heart, since if God were the 
least like me personally all my hope in Him would 



318 OUR INHERITED THEOLOGY 

perish. Nothing indeed can be more welcome to 
me than that impartial truth, for all my chances either 
of present happiness or future blessedness appear to 
me rigidly conditioned upon it. But that God should 
be also an infinitely alien substance to me — an infi- 
nitely other or foreign nature — this wounds my 
spontaneous faith in Him to its core, or leaves it a 
mere mercenary and servile homage. I perfectly 
understand how He should disown all private or 
personal relation to me, because personally I am 
anything but innocent, being to all the extent of my 
personal pretension — to all the extent of my dis- 
tinctively personal interests and ambitions — the im- 
passioned foe and rival of universal man. This is 
one thing. But it is quite a different and most 
odious thing that He should feel an envenomed 
animosity also to my innocent nature, or what binds 
me in indissoluble unity with every man of woman 
born. It is blasphemy indeed to conceive or enter- 
tain such a thought, for it makes God a wantonly 
inhuman being, unworthy the homage of every man 
who reverences his own nature, or is not spiritually 
a sot. I can only repeat accordingly that our in- 
herited theology must infallibly have ended by suf- 
focating me in my intellectual swaddling-clothes, had 
not my heart been providentially inspired by the 
many sensible tokens I enjoyed of God's vital presence 



SOTTISH AND SUFFOCATING. 319 

in our nature, even while undergoing the utmost per- 
sonal mortification and abasement at His hands, to 
reject the falsities which a perverse education had 
temporarily imposed upon it. 

Can you wonder then that with this intellectual 
experience on my part, and holding these convictions, 
I cleave for very life to the truth of God's natural 
humanity ? I do not say, mind you, the truth of His 
spiritual or essential manhood : for, as I have already 
said, that is a truth which no unsophisticated mind 
that acknowledges the Divine existence at all can 
help acknowledging : but of His natural, adventitious, 
or acquired manhood, a manhood which is forced 
upon Him, so to speak, by that constitutional limita- 
tion of the created consciousness to which men give 
the name of proprium in Latin, of self/iood, freedom, 
and so forth, in the vernacular. The Divine celestial 
and spiritual manhood, according to Swedenborg, is 
that which exists in the heavens, and constitutes the 
heavens ; being the reality of that goodness and truth 
in which good spirits and angels are principled, and 
of which they are appearances, consequently, and 
nothing but appearances. But the natural sphere of 
the mind is a universal sphere, embracing the hells as 
well as the heavens, and the Divine natural human- 
ity, accordingly, is a far more comprehensive truth 
than the Divine spiritual humanity, meeting the needs 



320 THE DIVINE NATURAL HUMANITY 

of diabolical existences no less than those of angelic, 
and guaranteeing therefore a permanent order of hu- 
man life on the earth which all the wit of man has 
been unable to forecast. The miracle of this order 
is that being natural it is spontaneous, and will 
accordingly dispense erelong with that indolent and 
imbecile array of merely professional or reflected life 
which constitutes the existing civilized order of the 
world, and hides the great body of humanity from 
the enjoyment of the common sun and air.* But 
you don't want prophecy, you want light. This how- 
ever is a demand that you can expect me to supply 
only in very limited form and measure ; but the bare 
attempt on my part to supply it will, I hope, evince 
my abundant good- will towards you in the premises. 
The creative love, because it is infinite or knows no 



* It is curious, in fact, Low blindly content the most respectable 
life of the world is to identify itself with "professing" or seeming 
to do, instead of practice or really doing. The physician does not teach 
men how to live in harmony with physical laws, but only "professes" 
to do so. The lawyer does not teach men how to live in harmony with 
moral laws, but only " professes " to do so. The clergyman does not 
teach men how to live in harmony with Divine laws, but only " pro- 
fesses " to do so. And yet it is in deference to the interests of this 
sham professional life of the world, that men are expected to forego their 
most veridical instincts of a really Divine life latent in men, and indeed 
practically acknowledge the great God himself a sham rather than ques- 
tion its vulgar but conventional manners and customs. 



ALONE WORTHY OF MEN'S ACKNOWLEDGMENT. 321 

alloy of self-love, abandons itself without reserve to 
whatsoever is not itself, to whatsoever is most dis- 
tinctly other and opposite to itself. We may indeed 
call this the law of the creative perfection, the neces- 
sity of perfect love : to delight in communicating it- 
self, or making itself unstintedly over, to whatsoever 
is intrinsically worthless or void of substance. Our 
delight, at all events, is not of this disinterested char- 
acter. Our activity craves remuneration. We delight 
to find a plenum of existence made ready to our hand. 
We go forth with joy only when we encounter a ful- 
ness of life and energy j because feeling ourselves 
inwardly poor and needy we covet the most abound- 
ing outward satisfactions. But the creative love 
being infinite or free of all subjective bias, is so es- 
sentially exuberant that it cannot help constituting 
itself a force of boundless subjective life, a force of 
unitary and universal selfhood, in others created from 
itself. Its essential life or delight is to find void and 
desolate ground whereinto it may forever inflow and 
abide; to find or rather invent in its creature so 
genuine an otherness to itself, so vivid an opposition 
or oppugnancy to its own perfection, that it may 
eternally inflow and indwell in the creature as in its 
very self. In truth and of necessity the creature con- 
stitutes the only selfhood known to the creative love ; 
for the latter being purely infinite or objective, that is, 



322 SELFHOOD THE NATURAL BIETHMARK 

destitute of all subjective aims or quality, it is of 
course incapable of realizing itself save in what is not 
itself, that is, in its creature. Selfhood then, or felt 
freedom in the creature, is his natural birthmark, or 
congenital stigma, without which he would be, not 
creature, but creator. 

Manifestly then creation imposes a certain natural 
limitation or stigma upon the creature which we call 
selfhood, and which requires to be Divinely rectified 
or overcome before the creature can be worthy of his 
creator. Creation, I say, imposes this obligation upon 
the creature : for what does creation mean ? It means, 
briefly but fully stated, the communication of the crea- 
tor s being or substance to the creature. But now 
mark : the creator's being or substance is not mate- 
rial, physical, outward, it is exclusively spiritual, 
metaphysical, inward. That is to say, it is altogether 
qualitative not quantitative, being identical with the 
creator Himself, therefore infinite as devoid of space, 
and eternal as devoid of time. But how in this state 
of things shall we conceive the creator creating — 
that is, communicating Himself to — others, unless 
these others be made to feel themselves first of all void 
both of spiritual being (or being in themselves), and 
natural existence (that is, existence in their race) ; 
unless in other words both their being and their 
existence confess themselves purely personal or con- 



OR CONGENITAL" STIGMA OF TfiE CREATURE : 323 

scious, purely apparitional or phenomenal, as made up 
of space and time ? The creature in literal truth can 
only be in himself, both spiritually and naturally, a 
purely formal or supposititious existence ; and the 
whole gist accordingly of the creative travail with 
him is to eviscerate him of his pretension to be any- 
thing else : that is, his pretension to constitute in 
himself his own being or substance. 

The creature of course resists the Divine teaching 
with all his spiritual vis inertice. New even to exist- 
ence, and utterly ignorant therefore of life, he fancies 
that he embraces it all in himself, nor ever doubts 
that he weaves from out that gossamer consciousness 
the stupendous realities of goodness and truth. But 
this consciousness of ours — this feeling we have of 
our life or being as inherent in ourselves, and as ab- 
solutely our own therefore — is in truth and all the 
while a bottomless cheat or illusion, unworthy of our 
slightest care or affection. And to suppose accord- 
ingly that selfhood, however relatively cultivated, 
refined, and exalted it may appear to our own eyes, 
is the true end of our creation, is the stupidest of 
absurdities. It exists in us in fact only as a most 
ignorant misappropriation of the creative substance ; 
only as the fruit of an idiot tale told us by our 
senses (known in sacred or symbolic speech as — 
the serpent) to the effect, that inasmuch as we are the 



324 AN IMPLICATION, NOT AN EXPLICATION 

subjects of organized or finite knowledge : namely, 
the knowledge of good limited by evil, and of evil lim- 
ited by good : we must be therefore like God, and 
partakers of His infinitude. It is in other words a 
pure misconception and offshoot of our native spiritual 
stupidity and immodesty ; and the best word we can 
say of it accordingly is, that it is a mere constitutional 
implication, and therefore by no means a living ex- 
plication, of the great mystery of the spiritual creation. 
Tor God, the creator, being spiritual or infinite, must 
be inscrutable to outward, material, or finite appre- 
hension, and can only become known to the creature 
therefore in so far as He Himself manages spiritually 
to exist or go forth in created form. Now the created 
form — in order that it may fitly symbolize or respond 
to the creative being or substance — must be above 
all things a unitary form, as expressing the unity of 
each and all creatures. But this unity of the created 
form is not an arbitrary or base outside result me- 
chanically imposed upon the creature by the creator. 
On the contrary it is the outgrowth exclusively of the 
creature's nature, which to the creature's own eyes 
seems to belong only to himself, or possess only one 
element, that namely of individuality, but apart from 
his own eyes is seen to belong to all men primarily, 
or to claim the much more important element of 
universality, and to allow the individual or private 



OF THE SPIRITUAL CREATION: 325 

element indeed only as included in that. The cre- 
ated form, consequently, as being a development of 
the creature's nature, is a strictly regenerate or social 
form : that is to say, presupposes a most bitter expe- 
rience on the creature's part of himself, and a most 
toilsome conflict with that self: an experience and 
conflict through which he is finally led to renounce 
his cherished personal independence, his diabolic 
pride of individuality, with all the ungodly lusts bred 
of it, and to esteem himself henceforth in God's 
sight and with all his heart as a race only, or Di- 
vinely natural and united man. Now remember 
always, that this regeneration of human nature, this 
bitter experience and conflict of man with himself, 
is confined of course to the human bosom, has no 
existence out of consciousness, or reflects itself in 
space and time only as space and time are themselves 
embraced in man's finite consciousness ; and that so 
long as our natural regeneration is in abeyance or 
immature, the Divine providence is obliged to deal 
with men's flimsy and fraudulent consciousness, their 
pretentious private selfhood or personality, as if it 
were a most vital spiritual reality, and not alone the 
intense and immeasurable counterfeit of the truth it 
will one day appear to itself to be. 

Thus the creative power, if it would be regarded as 
real, is bound above all things else to avouch or ulti- 



326 A DENSE MASK BEHIND WHICH 

mate itself in the natural form of the creature, a form 
which shall be past all dispute the creature's own 
form, and not the creator's merely in him, because it 
is a form of finite or imperfect knowledge, namely : a 
knowledge of good in evil and of evil in good. Tor 
until the creature thus veritably appears to himself, 
he can have no inward certainty that his creator is. 
As long as the creature attributes to himself the least 
reality inward or outward, spiritual or natural, he 
must honestly deny the creative power. That power 
vindicates its existence to the creature past all dispute, 
only by avouching itself the all of the created life 
both inward and outward, both spiritual and natural : 
for so long as the creature is left a particle of life or 
being in himself y he is honestly bound to atheism. 
And what most ideal nonsense it is to think and talk 
of the omnipotent God leaving us free to acknowl- 
edge or reject Him ! Or imputing to us forlorn luna- 
tics of time and space a sufficient degree of reason 
wherewith to measure our rightful dependence or 
independence upon His unknown perfection ! I can 
conceive of some intolerable goose of a man, inflated 
past all bounds of sanity by a conceit of his own per- 
sonal consequence, posing to attract or compel my 
homage. But the great and sincere creator of men, 
never ! He is infinitely free from such posturing and 
trickery. He has no finite selfhood or personality of 



GOD EFFECTS OUR NATURAL REDEMPTION: 327 

His own to render Him frivolous and vain, nor any 
finite memory consequently of His own to render 
Him susceptible to our praises and affronts. He 
does not ask us therefore to take His creative name 
for granted, and stifle any reasonable doubts we may 
feel on the subject in an unintelligent, hypocritical 
faith, for He makes our despised and degraded nature 
the miraculous mother-substance of all His creative 
effects, and the eternal witness accordingly of His 
creative name. Thus He is at once our spiritual 
being and our natural existence, our individual sub- 
stance and our universal form : the sentiment of self- 
hood in us, or our personal consciousness, being only 
the dense and unsuspected mask under which He con- 
ciliates our instincts of freedom, and gradually accom- 
modates the great truth to our rational recognition. 

Do I not well, then, to call selfhood or personality 
a stigma or limitation of the created nature instead 
of an endowment of it? It infers in the creature 
a purely subjective or conscious existence, and this 
style of existence is simply lawless, as being without 
any sacred tie of nature or race unconsciously to con- 
trol it. A conscious subject, indeed, without any 
real or unconscious object to control him, furnishes 
our conception of the devil. And if therefore we per- 
sist in referring our selfhood or personality to the 
direct hand of God, we affiliate the devil to Him. 



328 A MERE GENERALIZED FORM OF 

That selfhood utterly lacks this real or objective and 
unconscious worth, seems to me wholly undeniable. 
For by the hypothesis of creation, which stamps the 
creator the all of life, there is and can be no absolute 
other than He. He is being or life itself, and what- 
soever exists consequently exists only by Him. Evi- 
dently then the only otherness we can conceive in the 
creature to the creator as bottoming his selfhood or 
felt freedom, must be purely phenomenal, conscious, 
or subjective, without a grain of absolute truth, with- 
out a fibre of outward or objective reality. We can- 
not help characterizing our felt finiteness accordingly 
— that is, that conscious otherness or oppugnancy 
in us to the infinite which we call our selves — as 
essentially unreal : which means purely personal, 
phenomenal, fallacious. And an existence of this 
shadowy sort in the creature, except as incidentally 
involved in some higher creative end, is of course fatal 
to our acknowledgment of the creative perfection. 

But we have not the least right to regard the exist- 
ence in question as created. Our only obligation to 
do so would arise from our considering creation to be 
an absolute work on God's part, to constitute His 
proper glory in short, and subserve no ulterior spir- 
itual ends. But this would be supremely silly, for 
although God creates He does so only in order to 
redeem or make. He is infinitely more than a loving 



MAN'S NATURAL CONTRARIETY TO GOD. 329 

or passionate creator ; He is a wise and faithful 
maker or redeemer as well. It is in fact, as we have 
already seen, a mere scientific or rationalistic concep- 
tion of creation, to regard it as a simplistic process 
or one of natural evolution by simple generation. It 
is no such thing. Human nature, humanity, is the 
fruit not of an orderly evolution of the world's force, 
but rather of a stupendous historic revolution where- 
by the world's force is converted from a wholly out- 
ward relation to man to a wholly inward power in 
his own bosom, a power of enlightened affection and 
obedient thought. Human nature is the fruit of no 
simple or generative but of a profoundly composite 
or regenerative process, implying the creature's final 
or natural and objective evolution only by means of a 
previous complete spiritual immersion, or subjective 
involution, of the creative substance in created person 
or form, and its subsequent resurrection or emergence 
thence in a new or Divine-Human nature fit to confer 
any amount of objective substance or formal reality 
upon the creature. The scientific or rationalistic 
view of creation which no doubt served a good pur- 
pose in the infancy of the mind strikes one now as 
so childish and inane, that one no longer wonders at 
the horde of thoughtless and flippant young persons 
who give up creation altogether as an impossible con- 
ception, and are not slow even to avow themselves 



330 IMPOSSIBLE TO BELIEVE ANY LONGER 

atheists or nihilists : exactly as if the Divine existence 
and power were truths which men had always arrived 
at by reasoning instead of revelation, or were prob- 
lems which addressed themselves primarily not to the 
heart but to the understanding. 

But it is perfectly safe to say that the religious 
instinct in men, as it never has sought or accepted 
scientific guidance upon religious questions, so it 
never will seek or accept it in the future. It is the 
inappeasable craving of that instinct in the soul, 
whenever it comes to the discernment of its own 
spiritual nature, that the creative perfection prove 
above all things of an active quality j that is, that the 
creator not only be in Himself of an infinite and eter- 
nal worth or majesty, but that He livingly avouch 
such transcendent worth and majesty by some im- 
mortal work of justice or righteousness accomplished 
in the nature of His creature, which shall forever 
transfigure that nature or make it serve as an all- 
sufficient revelation and perpetual memento of His 
otherwise inscrutable name. We none of us, you 
know, are apt to have anything but a prudential re- 
gard for a great capitalist merely, or a man buried 
up to his head and ears in money ; while we feel a 
disinterested respect for every man of inventive or 
productive genius whose work enhances the wealth 
of the race or enlarges the bonds of human inter- 



IN GOD'S SUPEKSATTTRAL ATTRIBUTES. 331 

course. Just so we should feel no respect for an 
idle or luxurious deity, a deity for example who 
though himself armed with all might, and garlanded 
with the obsequious homage of heaven, could yet 
be content to see his earthly creatures wallowing in 
natural ignorance, indigence, and infamy, without 
even for a moment sacrificing or postponing the al- 
lurements of his voluptuous indolence to their effectual 
relief. It is not enough to say that we should feel 
no sincere respect for such a deity : our hearts would 
prompt us indeed to abhor his unworthy name, and 
reverence many an undistinguished man as of far 
diviner credentials. 

But it is high time to close this unduly long letter, 
though I have by no means begun to exhaust its 
superb theme, nor can ever grow tired of denouncing 
the heathenish superstitions of our infidel church and 
state, which utterly dehumanize the Divine perfection, 
and permanently defecate its claims to our homage, by 
stupidly representing it as of a rigidly supernatural 
quality. Even the literal Christian verity, in fact, 
binds us to say that God's spiritual perfection whether 
of love or wisdom finds its sole permanent purchase 
upon our regard in a redemptive work wrought by 
Hi?n in our nature, which justifies us in ascribing to 
Him henceforth a distinctly natural or impersonal 
infinitude, and so forever rids us both of the baleful 



332 GOD A PRACTICAL POWER ADEQUATE TO 

intellectual falsities inherent in the conception of His 
supernatural personality, and of the enforced per- 
sonal homage, precatory and deprecatory, engendered 
by that conception in the sphere of our sentimental 
piety. The principle involved in this dogmatic trans- 
action is that of the hierarchical subjection of passion 
to action, of root to stem, stem to flower, and flower 
to fruit. And the practical lesson to be derived from 
it is that God is not willing to be had in reverence of 
men for His absoluteness and infinity, but only for 
His relative perfection : in that being rich and of in- 
comparable renown He yet makes Himself poor and 
of no repute that we through His destitution may 
become rich and powerful. And when He who is the 
acknowledged top of all perfection — the crown of 
every excellency which the foolish heart of man covets, 
the excellency of will, of knowledge, of power — thus 
renounces His absoluteness, renounces every patent- 
right He has to our regard, every conceded or uncon- 
ditional advantage borrowed from our servile tradi- 
tions, and consents like any unprivileged person, like 
any honest workingman, diligently to sue out His title 
to our allegiance in the court of every man's equitable 
judgment, it is high time for us to learn that a man 
is in the long run only so much as he does, that there 
is no such thing as a chronic excellency — -as an ab- 
solute or fossil perfection — ever practicable either to 



ALL MAN'S NATURAL (OR IMPERSONAL) NEEDS. 333 

man or God, and that our only chance therefore for 
immortality lies in no stored-up capital of goodness 
and truth we possess, but in the acute life or charac- 
ter we daily witness in putting all our accumulations 
of goodness and truth out to active use. 

We laugh, as I said awhile ago, at an inventor who 
should ask us to take his genius on trust, or with- 
out any evidence of its reality. And there can be 
no more offensive tribute to the Divine name than to 
show Him a deference we deny to the rankest char- 
latan. How infinitely unworthy of God it would be 
to exact or expect of the absolute and unintelligent 
creatures of His power a belief out of all proportion 
to their sensible knowledge, or unbacked by anything 
but tradition ! In the absence of sensible knowledge 
tradition is no doubt the next best thing ; but that 
the deputy should be allowed permanently to sup- 
plant its principal is a monstrous absurdity. I am 
free to confess for my own part that I have no belief 
in God's absolute or irrelative and unconditional per- 
fection. I have not the least sentiment of worship 
for His name, the least sentiment of awe or reverence 
towards Him, considered as a perfect person sufficient 
unto Himself. That style of deity exerts no attrac- 
tion either upon my heart or understanding. Any 
mother who suckles her babe upon her own breast, 
any bitch in fact who litters her periodical brood of 



334 HE NEVER POSES FOR MEN'S ADMIRATION. 

pups, presents to my imagination a vastly nearer and 
sweeter Divine charm. What do I care for a good- 
ness which boasts of a hopeless aloofness from my 
own nature — except to hate it with a manly inward 
hatred? And what do I care for a truth which 
professes to be eternally incommunicable to its own 
starving progeny — but to avert myself from it with 
a manly outward contempt ? Let men go on to cher- 
ish under whatever name of virtue, or wisdom, or 
power they will, the idol of Self- Sufficiency : I for 
my part will cherish the name of Him alone whose 
insufficiency to Himself is so abject that He is inca- 
pable of realizing Himself except in others. In short 
I neither can nor will spiritually confess any deity 
who is not essentially human, and existentially thence 
exclusively natural, that is to say, devoid of all distinc- 
tively personal or limitary pretensions. 






t li a m n y n i f-mr-TTTk a a *t~ u \ % ' 4 . 




» ■ in «« * » * » * t - * * ' * " ",;-"i 1 .L, j ft r n 



LETTER XXIII 




Y DEAR FRIEND : — Doubtless you are 
I able to discern by this time why neither my 
faith nor my reason is at all disconcerted 
by the current rationalistic criticism of the 
gospels. It is because I have never valued the gos- 
pels for their own sake, but exclusively for the revela- 
tion they offer of the Divine name in connection with 
man's nature and history. To say : that a certain 
man was born of a virgin, and that after enduring a 
life of great ignominy and suffering at the hands 
of his countrymen, he was put to a violent and 
opprobrious death, from which however after three 
days* sepulture he rose again, and presented himself in 
bona fide recognizable form to his amazed disciples : is 
clearly anything but a scientific statement, and arrests 
men's attention only because it appeals to a grander 
and more universal instinct in them than that of 
science, namely: the instinct of conscience, or the 
interests of their immortal life. It is strictly fair 



336 A HIGHER AND LOWER ORDER 

to say, moreover, that the statement never purported 
itself to have any scientific validity except in the 
hands of unintelligent and incompetent partisans. 
It was originally intended to furnish a purely doc- 
trinal footing to men's intellectual and spiritual life, 
by connecting their nature with God in the highly 
exceptional and representative personality of Christ. 
A certain obvious antagonism has always announced 
itself between religion and science, growing out of 
the circumstance that they both make their appeal 
to the human intelligence, but one to a higher intel- 
ligence, the other to a lower : the only dispute being 
which intelligence is the higher, that represented by 
science, or that represented by faith. Science com- 
prises the field of our distinctively finite knowledge, 
while religion has always had the pretension to con- 
nect us with the infinite. There ought to be no 
contrariety between the two pursuits in themselves, 
any more than there is contrariety between soul and 
body; for the interests of religion are emphatically 
and exclusively those of soul, and the interests of sci- 
ence as emphatically and exclusively those of body. 
Their only apparent quarrel is owing to the existence 
of foolish adherents and advocates on either side: 
many men of science being narrow enough to have no 
broadly human sympathies, and therefore very apt to 
grow indignant at having their chosen pursuit charac- 



OF KNOWLEDGE IN MAN. 337 

terized as a low order of knowledge compared with 
any other order; and religious men being, as a gen- 
eral thing, not so devoted to the interests of spiritual 
truth, primarily, as to feel reluctant in season and out 
of season to press this humiliating conviction home 
upon them. 

Distribute the blame of the quarrel where you 
will, however, this difference of a higher and lower 
order of knowledge in man does unquestionably at- 
tach to the relations of religion or philosophy (for 
the two things are sufficiently near to be regarded 
for our present purpose as almost identical) and sci- 
ence : religion being concerned with man's direct 
relations to God, and science with his indirect ones. 
Science admits no conclusion within her own sphere 
which is not verifiable by sense. And religion in 
her sphere disowns and distrusts every conclusion not 
distinctly and persistently falsified by sense. Surely 
a difference more vital or practical than this, can 
scarcely be imagined; and there can be no more 
fatal folly with reference to man's intellectual in- 
terests, than to make light of it. On one side we 
have the human soul, and the spiritual world, which 
is the soul's " real habitation and native country," as 
Swedenborg finely phrases it. On the other, we have 
the human body, and the material world, which at 
most is that body's temporary dwelling-place. The 



338 SCIENCE SELF-DISQUALIFIED 

difference between these realms is vast to be sure, 
unimaginably vast : but there is no fibre of conflict 
between them, save what is borrowed on one side or 
the other from men's ignorance and perversity. If 
men of science are content to consider man's phenom- 
enal existence his true life or being, because it is 
the only life or being in him which reports itself to 
sense, I do not see what right religious men have 
to complain : they surely are not compelled to think as 
men of science think. And if religious men in their 
turn are content to consider man's highest life or 
being made up of his relations to any person or per- 
sons outside the pale of human nature, I don't see 
what right men of science have to complain : they 
surely are not compelled to believe as the men of faith 
do. For neither side has any just claim to the mo- 
nopoly of error ; and each therefore should diligently 
refrain from pressing his own characteristic nonsense 
upon the respect of the other. 

The weakness of scientific men, as I have shown 
in former letters, consists in their attempting to phi- 
losophize upon strictly scientific data. The funda- 
mental postulate of science is that all known existence 
is conditioned in space and time, and all her distinc- 
tive achievements imply the truth of that postulate. 
But when one seeks to get no longer a scientific, 
but a purely philosophic, result from that barren 



AS A RESEARCH OF BEING. 339 

premiss, his labor necessarily turns out negative and 
fruitless, because it proceeds upon a mere unrighteous 
confounding of being with existence. Of course phi- 
losophy has no objection to admit with science that 
all known existence is conditioned in space and time. 
It only denies that the unknown being from which 
this known existence is derived, and of which it is 
a manifestation, is itself so conditioned; and conse- 
quently it affirms that any philosophic research, or 
research of being infinite and eternal, conducted upon 
the mere data of existence, or space and time princi- 
ples, can have no other than a negative and sceptical 
result. In other words : philosophy maintains that 
our time and space knowledge, or the estimate we 
put upon finite existence, is the exact measure of our 
ignorance of true being : and so disqualifies science 
as a philosophic discipline from the start. And man- 
ifestly the only effectual thing that science can do 
in rebuttal of this criticism is in its turn to invali- 
date the peculiar notion of religion or philosophy in 
regard to man's true life or being. And this it has 
never yet attempted to do, for Swedenborg is the only 
man in the intellectual history of the race that has 
ever intelligently formulated the axioms of religion 
or philosophy in regard to man's true life or being : 
and scientific men not only, but even our soi-disant 
philosophers as well, who are, the bulk of them, mere 



340 THE SPIRITUAL BEING OF THINGS 

unaffiliated bantlings of science, are in the habit 
of practically ignoring Swedenborg's labors, for the 
cheap and easy reason that any man who claims an 
insight of the spiritual or living world, is ipso facto 
a self-pronounced lunatic. 

The being of things, according to philosophy, is 
never constituted by their existence, for in order that 
things should be able to exist, or go forth in sensible 
or phenomenal form, that is, their own form, they 
must first have being in their creator • and it is worse 
than idle, accordingly, it is misleading, in science to 
attempt accounting for the being of things by alleging 
the laws or conditions of their visible existence. This 
is both unscientific and unphilosophic. In the first 
place the laws of existence are never used by scientific 
men to express what originates or creates existence, 
by giving it life or soul; but only to express what 
constitutes existence, by giving it body. And in the 
second place the being of things to philosophy never 
falls outside the things themselves, or in nature, but 
is always intensely inward and spiritual. Thus the 
Christian religion would grossly violate philosophy 
and science both, if it attempted to make the being 
of men convertible with their base natural existence ; 
but it actually offends neither of them, and on the 
contrary accords with them both, by making it iden- 
tical with Divine or creative Love. For God, the 



DISTINCT FKOM THEIR NATURAL EXISTENCE. 341 

creator of man, it says, is Love : and we men, His 
creatures, must be in ourselves — not love of course, 
because this would be to make creature creator — but 
only forms, phenomena, appearances, images, of love. 
That is, our fundamental natural quality, or distinc- 
tive human identity, must be constituted of affection, 
and of thought thence derived ; and only to a super- 
ficial or fatuous regard will it seem to affiliate itself 
to the elements of space and time. 

Now it is essential to our conception of Divine and 
creative Love, that it be perfect or infinite. And 
perfect or infinite love is altogether objectively, not 
subjectively, constituted. That is to say, it is only 
what it does ; or reveals itself to us only by repro- 
ducing its potencies and felicities in others, createa 
from itself. It is not subjectively cognizable, or self- 
cognizable: for if it were thus cognizable — cognizable 
in itself — it would be differentially related to other 
being than itself, and hence confess itself uncreative 
and finite. In short it must essentially be, and phe- 
nomenally exist, only in communicating its being and 
existence to others, so endowing them with its own 
infinitude or perfection. Such is our inevitable con- 
ception of Divine or creative Love, as being infinite 
or perfect. 

But now observe. It follows from this conception 
of creative Love, that its creatures, in order to avouch 



342 WE ACHIEVE THE LOVE OF OUR KIND 

their dependence upon it, or prove themselves proper 
and adequate phenomenal types, forms, or images of 
it, should as such typical forms or images be objec- 
tively rather than subjectively pronounced: that is, 
should be primarily forms of use to others, and only 
subordinately to such use forms of life or delight in 
themselves. In other words : it is a law of all cre- 
ated existence — such is the dazzling perfection or 
infinitude of its creator ! — that it realize its pecul- 
iar potencies and felicities only in loving what is not 
itself, or more briefly still, in unloving itself. For it 
is obvious that the creature of an infinite power cannot 
realize life in an absolute or infinite manner : that is, 
by loving others without unloving himself; simply 
because a potency of this sort in the creature would 
argue him to be uncreated, or identify him with the 
creator, making him also to be infinite Love. And 
if he cannot love in an infinite or absolute manner, 
he can only do so in a finite, contingent, or relative 
manner, that is, by ceasing to love himself. For you 
must in the interest of philosophy perfectly under- 
stand that the only principle of evil in God's universe, 
— or what is equivalent, the only thing that separates 
between creature and creator — is the selfhood or 
identity of the creature : * so that there would have 
been no other way possible to the creative Love of 

* See Appendix B. 



ONLY BY PRACTICALLY UNLOVING SELF. 343 

avoiding the existing evil of the universe but by void- 
ing the creature's personal identity, or leaving him 
without natural selfhood: thus without the remot- 
est possibility of spiritual conjunction with God : in 
short, both literally and spiritually uncreated. Thus 
in loving myself supremely, or in prizing above all 
things else the interests of my personal identity, I 
spiritually separate myself from God, and all the true 
and living and lovely things the Divine name stands 
for in the creature ; for in so doing I make my bosom 
the very fons et origo malorum, and consequently fill 
my daily life with a spirit of hatred and intolerance 
towards all other men. Accordingly it is only by 
contriving to utAovq myself that I can effectually do 
my part in the extinction of the hells bound up in 
my nature, or ever practically succeed like Jesus 
Christ in loving my fellow-men. 

We are now in a position to understand what 
Swedenborg says of the tendency of creative order 
to ultimate itself, or descend to< extremes, in the 
nature of the creature. "By creation is signified 
what is Divine inwardly and outwardly, or in first 
things and last: for everything created by God has 
its beginning in Him, and from that beginning pro- 
ceeds according to order even to the ultimate end, 
thus through the heavens into the world, and there 
rests as in its ultimate, for the ultimate of Divine order 



344 SPIRITUAL CREATION UNREAL 

is realized in mundane nature!' * " The ultimate of 
Divine order is in Man; and because man is the 
ultimate of Divine order he is also its basis or foun- 
dation. Since the Lord's influx does not stop in the 
middle, but proceeds to its ultimates, as was just 
said; since this middle through which the influx 
passes is the angelic heaven, and the ultimate to 
which it tends is man or the human race ; and since 
nothing independent or disconnected with other things 
can exist : it follows that heaven and the human race 
are so intimately conjoined that each subsists by the 
other. So that the human race without heaven would 
be like a chain which had lost a link, and heaven 
without the human race would be like a house with- 
out a foundation. " f " Divine order never stops in 
an intermediate point " (as the angel or heaven) "and 
there forms a thing without its ultimate, for then it 
would not have perfectly expressed itself: but goes 
straight on to its ultimate and when there it begins 
formation, and also by mediums there brought to- 
gether it redintegrates itself, and produces ulterior 
things by procreations: whence the ultimate is called 
the seminary or seed-place of heaven." \ And so on. 
What now is the plain meaning of these and a 
thousand similar passages ? 

* Swedenborg's Arcana, 10634. $ Ibid. 315. 

f Heaven and Hell, 304. 



UNLESS BASED IN THE CREATED NATURE. 345 

They express to my judgment the purpose of the 
creative wisdom to make its work thoroughly real to 
the understanding of the creature, by giving it a fixed 
or stable anchorage in his nature, or absolutely weld- 
ing it to his self-consciousness. It is idle to suppose 
that a creature can ever come to consciousness, or 
what is the same thing, can ever realize life, or even 
existence, save upon a natural basis. For his nature 
as a creature cuts him off from life or being in 
himself, and stamps him utterly dependent for all 
his subjective experience upon a life or being in- 
finitely remote from himself — viz. his creator. And 
unless therefore his very nature as thus subjectively 
imbecile and impotent be creatively organized, he 
can never come to self-consciousness, much less 
to any of the providential spiritual issues of such 
consciousness.* His nature as a creature is his sole 
reality in time or eternity, and unless he be en- 
dowed with natural reality therefore, he must forfeit 
his chances both of spiritual and personal, or of real 

* There is and can be no such thing in the universe as an unrelated 
or disconnected existence, and Swedenborg is perfectly philosophical in 
denouncing such a pretension. Indeed, if it were otherwise, the natural 
or universal element would be wholly lacking to our sentient experience. 
That is to say, there would be no nature and no universe, but the entire 
realm of existence would dwindle into a logical poliverse, every forlorn 
and disastrous fragment of it fatally bumping the head of every other, or 
nullifying instead of adding to the sum of the other's well-being. 



346 IMPLICATION OF THE CREATURE'S NATURE 

and seeming, life forever. His nature is abundantly 
real by virtue of its implicit logical contrariety to 
that of the creator; and all his own reality, which 
he ignorantly and foolishly supposes to inhere in his 
conscious self, derives exclusively from it. So that 
provided only the creator's resources be actually great 
enough to vivify the creature's nature, and there- 
by avouch His own spiritual infinitude in mak- 
ing the creature's intrinsic evil the eternal witness 
of His power, creation will always have a fixed or 
stable basis of reality to the creature's imagination, 
and in that secure anchorage the creative wisdom 
may ever after freely work out whatever proper and 
perfect spiritual issues its own infinite love may in- 
wardly inspire. 

To say, then, that creative order never halts in an 
intermediate spiritual plane, as heaven or the angel, 
but goes straight on to its natural ultimate, or resting- 
place, in the world or man, and there redintegrates 
itself, or gathers itself up anew, for spiritual procrea- 
tion : is simply to say in other words that creative 
order is not the wilful, arbitrary, unreal thing it is 
generally thought among men to be, as based upon 
the sovereign license of the creator, but is a most 
tender, reasonable, and real thing, as based in the 
creature's own nature, which alone accordingly makes 
it obligatory upon him to observe it. 



IE CREATION, ALONE MAKES IT REAL. 347 

Let us now repeat the substance of what we have 
just said, in order the better to impress it on our 
intelligence. 

The intellectual secret of creation, then, very briefly 
stated, is that the creator is bound by His own per- 
fection — in order to give His creature spiritual or 
immortal conjunction with Himself — first of all to 
endow him with natural reality, or conscious projec- 
tion to himself; and then spiritually to vivify this 
natural consciousness of his by giving it social form 
or quality : so enabling the creature to slough off, of 
himself as it were, the selfish and monstrous growths 
which have signalized his natural immaturity. 

And now if these things be true we see at once 
how crudely literal — that is to say, how thoroughly 
destitute of living or spiritual truth — the current 
ecclesiastical conceptions of creative order are. In- 
deed the word " order " is totally inapplicable to the 
ordinary church dogma of creation, as this dogma 
makes it a mere brute work of omnipotence, result- 
ing in the production of outward Nature, or the end- 
less chaos of mineral, vegetable, and animal existence. 
It is a creation in other words with neither beginning, 
nor middle, nor end, and so is exquisitely unadapted 
to rational recognition. As Swedenborg describes 
creation on the other hand, it is a house of three 
stories or degrees ; the highest or inmost degree cor- 



348 SWEDENBORG DESCRIBES CREATION 

responding to the private or bedroom floor of our 
houses, in which the inmate dwells secure from all 
intrusion ; the second or midmost degree correspond- 
ing to the public or drawing room floor of modern 
houses, in which the inmate receives and entertains 
his friends ; and the first or lowest story correspond- 
ing to the basement or kitchen floor of our houses, in 
which the merely animal or material needs of the in- 
mates are provided for : and he names these succes- 
sive stories, accordingly, the first : Natural ; the sec- 
ond : Spiritual ; the third : Celestial. But the church 
dogma makes creation a house of one story only, and 
that story the lowest, or basement ; so that he who 
follows ecclesiastical guidance, is left without intel- 
lectual growth, and is kept consequently in the dark 
as to the future fortunes of his race, and of himself, 
both alike. Indeed the religionist by profession has 
no right to know whether the daemonic object of 
his worship — being totally unidentified as he puta- 
tively is by the assumption of his creature's nature 
— may not leave the latter at any moment in the 
lurch, with every tender yearning of his heart after 
good forever unsatisfied, as now, and every restless 
desire of his intellect after truth turned to rayless 
night. 

But I concede too much to the church in saying 
that it makes creation a work of " omnipotence." 



AS A HOUSE OF THREE STORIES. 349 

For omnipotence being Divine is not recognizable by- 
sense, and creation as the church understands it per- 
tains wholly to the sphere of sense. Omnipotence is 
recognizable only by man's rational mind, and in order 
to be so recognized, must avouch itself in a work of 
infinite love carried out by infinite wisdom to a result 
of infinite practical benignity. Accordingly wherever 
man's rational mind recognizes a work of this com- 
plex infinitude or perfection, there and there alone it 
sees revealed to its adoring recognition the omnipo- 
tent creator, and on bended knees gives Him the name 
of Jehovah God forever. It is sheer folly to make the 
senses a standard of judgment in relation to omnipo- 
tence or anything else Divine ; because the senses are 
finite or organic and discern appearances only, while 
Divine things are infinite and inorganic, that is, the 
exact inversion of whatsoever finitely exists, or sensi- 
bly appears to be. 

But the professional church, heeding the bare let- 
ter of revelation only, that is, restricting its intellect- 
ual interests to the domain of fact exclusively, puts 
itself out of all sympathetic relation to man's nascent 
and kindling spiritual intelligence, and proves itself 
in every point of view a mere cumberer of the ground 
which it was appointed to cultivate. For example : 
all the active intellect of the church at present is ex- 
pended in the defence of miracles, as if God's honor 



350 MIRACLE A SENSUOUS SYMBOL 

were specially imperilled by the current scientific 
scepticism on that subject. But scientific men sim- 
ply declare that miracle is contrary to the observed 
course of nature, and that however men may have 
been content to believe in it in times past, they are 
no longer able to do so ; churchmen themselves, if the 
question were put to the test, being no more able to 
do so than any other people. And it is evident that 
the church can say nothing to the purpose in reply 
to this criticism. And this simply because it is so 
habitually indifferent to the distinction between fact 
and truth, as practically to believe them identical or of 
like sacredness • so that when science condemns mira- 
cle as an irrational or intellectually immoral preten- 
sion, the church feels its very existence threatened, 
and its sole raison d'etre denied. Whereas it should 
say, if it were any longer Divinely empowered to say 
anything : " True, miracle is irrational, and I equally 
with you condemn it as unworthy of men's present 
belief. But it was once the only form under which 
human stupidity allowed the truth of God's infinitude 
to become realized by human thought, and I prize 
that truth of truths so highly that I can scarcely feel, 
as you do, like taking vengeance upon the expressive 
symbol which alone preserved it to my apprehension. 
A sentimental mother sometimes tenderly preserves 
the cradle in which her first-born was rocked asleep. 



OF THE CEEATIVE INFINITUDE. 351 

I don't know that one can justify this proceeding 
absolutely ; but it is at least a pleasanter sight than 
to see her attacking it with an axe and chopping it 
up for firewood." 




LETTER XXIV. 

? Y DEAR FRIEND : — If the considerations 
advanced in the last letter have half the 
force to your mind that they have to mine, 
you will be in no danger of depending 
upon science for the supply of your intellectual nutri- 
ment. The tether of science is the field of sense ; 
and an intellect which is inwardly quickened there- 
fore: i. e. freed henceforth from sensual limitation, 
since it now views the whole world of sense only 
in the light of an outward imagery or correspondence 
of man's inward being : is scientifically inappreci- 
able. Properly speaking, the senses are completely 
subterranean to the sphere of our characteristic hu- 
man life, the sphere of our characteristic human — 
as distinguished from our animal — affections and 
thoughts. And one would as soon think therefore 
of consulting a grubbing mole about the approach- 
ing occultation of Jupiter, as of consulting our best 
scientific men (purely as such) in regard to the 



SCIENCE TERRENE, SENSE SUBTERRENE. 353 

existence of spiritual or celestial realities. Men be- 
come acquainted with these realities, as it seems to 
me, not through any docile hearing of the ear merely, 
still less through any wearisome ratiocinative balan- 
cing of probabilities, but purely in the way of an 
exquisitely inward or aesthetic craving, that is, in the 
way of a gradual expansion or education of the heart 
to them. And in my opinion consequently any man 
must be still unacquainted with them who needs the 
testimony of his senses to assure him of their exist- 
ence. For this would imply that they were not spir- 
itual but material realities, existing in space and time. 
Tell me, my friend, you who admit the existence of 
a legitimate object of adoration to the human heart, 
that is, of an infinite goodness and truth, what part 
do your senses play in promoting your belief of that 
wholesome truth ? Do they steadfastly lead you to 
love your neighbor, or the human race, by practically 
postponing the demands of your self-love? Have 
they ever, in fact, prompted you to make the acquaint- 
ance of good by renouncing your own habitual and 
familiar evil ? Yet respond as you may to these inter- 
rogations, I am persuaded there is literally no other 
way for us to do, and attain to the life of God in 
nature. Anything short of this leaves us in the mere 
mud of animality, out of which we originally sprung. 
And though we may all our lives reason with the 



354 ESSENTIAL OR SPIRITUAL, AND EXISTENTIAL 

unction of self-styled seraphs, or devils, we shall only 
the more effectually succeed in duping ourselves : we 
shall never either of us add one to the ranks of true 
— or effulgent Divine-natural — manhood. 

The essential or spiritual Divine manhood consists 
in this : that it is wholly creative, or communicative 
of itself to others created from itself, in which others 
it may forever indwell consequently as a perpetual 
fountain of life or being. In other words, it consists 
in a power of loving infinitely : that is, without regard 
to self. Such doubtless is the tide of creative life or 
being taken at its flood, or viewed in itself: what now 
is it taken at its ebb, or viewed in its results ? 

The answer to this question is very simple. The 
existential or natural Divine manhood consequent upon 
this essential or spiritual infinitude in God — for we 
can no more conceive of an Esse or being without a cor- 
responding Existere or going forth, than we can con- 
ceive of spirit without the implication of nature — con- 
sists in a most real and adoring response on the part of 
the creature thus miraculously endowed with being. 
What is this response ? It consists exclusively in the 
power which the creature has to love finitely : for 
finite love, so it be genuine and unaffected, is spiritu- 
ally one or harmonic with infinite love. Now, the 
only way in which finite love can guarantee its own 
genuineness, or its spiritual and intimate unity with 



OR NATURAL, DIVINE MANHOOD. 355 

infinite love, is by subordinating self-love to it : that 
is, by loving others at the expense of itself. For as 
to " love infinitely, 5 ' that is, creatively, means to exert 
a wholly objective love, or one which encounters no 
obstacle or impediment in the subjectivity of the crea- 
tor, but leaves the creature alone conscious, so the 
creature, or finite lover, on his part, is bound to signal- 
ize his love, or avouch its truth, by overcoming what- 
ever impediment his subjectivity or selfhood offers to 
its exercise. And in no way short of this will he 
ever succeed in manifesting his own true quality. 
For if he should love by the direct force of selfhood, 
that is, without pungent self-denial, or the constraint 
of his own subjective tendencies, he would love not 
finitely, but infinitely : that is, he would be no longer 
creature, but creator. 

This seems plain enough, and we need not attempt 
to make it more so. But it is logically incumbent 
upon me to point out the philosophic inference with 
which this most benign truth is fraught : an inference 
which leaves the philosophy of incredulity, or the 
science of mere rationalistic negation which we are 
combating, no honest leg to go upon. Bear in mind 
all the while, however, that I say no word in dispar- 
agement of the legitimate activity of science. I only 
arraign the wisdom of those of her particular votaries 
who are not content with this legitimate activity of 



356 THE SUBJECTIVE ELEMENT IN EXPERIENCE 

their mistress, but incessantly attempt to pervert it 
into a power eminently if not absolutely hostile to the 
race's spiritual welfare. 

If then it be the law of the finite intelligence to 
realize a life or being in harmony with that of its 
creator only by postponing itself to others, or inwardly 
dying to its own subjective tendencies, it follows that 
the subjective element in existence is an evil ele- 
ment, and is obliged to be definitely overcome or set 
at nought in the creature's experience, before he can 
have any taste of true being. He may indeed have 
conscious existence to any extent you please, that is, 
may compass the fullest possible acquaintance both 
with physical pleasure and pain, and moral good and 
evil : but his physical and moral existence do not con- 
stitute his being, they merely give him self-conscious- 
ness, which is the opposite of being. These physical 
and moral experiences of his are providentially in 
his way to being, I admit, but they are in the way 
as an obstacle and not as a help if he be inclined to 
rest in them, just as New York to an inhabitant of 
Boston is in his way to Washington, if he be disin- 
clined to stay in New York : but they are not his 
being any more than New York is Washington. 
They doubtless seem to himself, while he is spiritually 
ignorant or unconscious of what true being is, to 
be the veritable thing itself; and doubtless also this 



INTRINSICALLY EVIL AND PERISHABLE. 357 

seeming life or being of his negatively promotes his 
eventual experience of the reality, inasmuch as by mis- 
leading him into the gravest practical mistakes of judg- 
ment and errors of conduct, it gradually stimulates re- 
flection upon himself, and ends by convincing him that 
the reliance he has hitherto had on selfhood as a basis 
of true being, has been grossly misplaced. All this 
is true, but only confirms what I have been saying, 
namely : that the life a man is subjectively conscious 
of, whatever providential uses may incidentally sanc- 
tify it to his true life, is yet all unworthy to be his 
true life ; nor does it ever of itself exert any other 
than a strictly negative bearing upon such true life. 

The subjective element in experience, then, is an 
evil element, especially in human life, where it attains 
to really devilish dimensions, or becomes every par- 
ticular man's private and most sacred selfhood, 
organizing him into the fiercest and most jealous 
antagonism with every other man, his natural fellow. 
What makes it evil? Because being a purely 
supposititious or fantastic life, it puts a man, so 
far as he comes under its influence, out of true re- 
lation to God who is his only source of being, and 
so turns him into a more and more finite or organic 
existence merely, with no chances of mental expan- 
sion or enlargement accordingly but in the way 
of imagination or insane illusion. The happiness 



358 SCIENCE A PERPETUAL STRAINER 

of a conscious or created being must consist in 
the peaceful or harmonious relations that bind it to 
its creator. And if these relations are falsified at their 
very core, by the creature coming to refer his being 
to himself, or to put himself practically in the place 
of God with respect to every important interest and 
responsibility of life, disease, disaster, and death are 
bound, of course, in the interest of his own eventual 
spiritual sanity, to ensue : and meanwhile the human 
family goes on to realize life as best it can in the 
discordant, disgusting, and wellnigh intolerable, form 
under which we at present know it. 

Now science cannot go behind the senses. She is 
the first dry land bred of their watery and wide-welter- 
ing chaos, and her obvious raison d'etre is to furnish 
a kindly fixed earth to men's feet, while they are try- 
ing to realize a worthier life for themselves than sense 
and science both are capable of ministering. She is 
not, and never will be, the beckoning heaven of men's 
eternal hope and aspiration ; she is but the necessary 
illustrative earth of their peaceful and orderly enjoy- 
ment, until that heaven yields itself to their solicita- 
tions. And she cannot go beyond her foundations. 
Beginning in sense and its necessities, she must 
always report herself to the guardianship of sense to 
have her labors identified and acknowledged. And 
as the senses are too dull and blunt to recognize truth 



FOR THE IMBECILE JUDGMENTS OF SENSE. 359 

save in the lifeless form of fact, so science consequently, 
the child of sense on the maternal side, is nothing 
more than a living memory of the race, organizing the 
facts of universal experience and observation which are 
requisite to base its future intellectual and spiritual 
unity. And being thus tethered as she is to sense or 
the realm of mere appearance in man, it is grotesquely 
impudent in her to pretend to have a speculation to 
offer, or a word to say, in reference to any deeper ques- 
tion of man's being. His being is essentially immor- 
tal, and the bare shadow of it therefore at most falls 
within the realm of time and space, or reports itself 
to sense ; and what should we think of a blockhead 
who offered to give us a knowledge of the physiology 
of the human body, upon no other basis than that 
supplied by a man's occasional shadow in a looking- 
glass ? 

Let us expect no help from science then, and a 
fortiori none from sense, in respect to our partici- 
pation in God's living or spiritual creation. It is 
very true that the spiritual creation is eternally an- 
chored in sense, because man's rudimental conception 
of Divine existence or order is exclusively organic 
or outward ; but sense has no perception of the honor 
done it in this creative anchorage, persuading itself 
indeed that creation is altogether physical, and that 
its own function is simply to look on and reason 



360 NOT SENSE, BUT SELFHOOD, THE CHIEF 

about the spectacle, and in the long run end pos- 
sibly — who knows ? — by enjoying it. In the ear- 
liest literature of the race, which is always symbolic 
or sacred, sense is denominated the serpent, because 
cradling as it does man's infant intelligence it takes 
him captive unawares, and makes him think that 
its own good and evil, its own true and false, its 
own pleasure and pain, are the measure of all Divine 
or spiritual reality. There is not much danger of 
this effect now, for owing to the race's long expe- 
rience sense is pretty well unmasked, and has had 
its poor rampant and innocent head quite sufficiently 
bruised indeed under the heel of men. That is to 
say : the humbuggery of sense and its promises is 
now perfectly understood in theory, and the human 
race once having learned is not likely soon to un- 
learn the lesson, however indifferent to it any num- 
ber of individuals may continue to show themselves 
in practice. Man is vastly more liable to harm 
nowadays from the feeblest whispers of his own 
inmost and unsuspected Eve or selfhood, than from 
the loudest outward vociferation of his senses. And 
this is a liability which all his science based on 
sense is noway competent to shield him from, but 
only to deepen his experience of: which remark 
brings me, by a somewhat loitering detour I admit, 
to what I left so incompletely said about the church 



OBSTACLE TO MAN'S SPIRITUAL WELFARE. 361 

and its history in my sixteenth Letter. But before 
resuming the thread of our discourse there inter- 
rupted let us bring the present letter to a close. 

All the science or knowledge of life to which I am 
begotten, born, and bred by our existing civilization, 
tells me with an undeviating persistency, that there is 
nothing so Divinely true, because so Divinely sweet 
and sufficing, as selfhood : and the consequence is 
that I actually succeed in giving the real Divinity 
in my great race or nature only a scant and drowsy 
recognition. Indeed if I should freely yield to the 
scientific instinct within me, or abandon myself to 
the current inspiration of culture about me, I doubt 
not I should end by altogether sacrificing that patient 
Divinity to the unscrupulous idol and counterfeit 
enshrined in myself. For then my senses authenti- 
cated by science, and unchecked by conscience, would 
be free to tell me that my life or being is strictly 
identical with my finite personality, and that the 
only death and hell I shall ever haye to dread is 
one which menaces that personality with desolation : 
namely, the death and hell wrapped up in my most 
intimate or Divine-natural innocence, truth, and chas- 
tity. I confess though that having had one's eyes 
once opened to a glimmer of eternal truth on the 
subject, one has no hesitation in hoping that before 
he is caught hearkening to this gospel of an atheistic 



362 NIRVANA, OR SELF-EXTINCTION, IMPOSSIBLE 

and drunken self-conceit, he may actually perish out 
of life, and the great lord of life know him no more 
forever. I for one should distinctly prefer forfeit- 
ing my self-consciousness altogether, to being found 
capable, in ever so feeble a degree, of identifying 
my being with it. My being lies utterly outside of 
myself, lies in utterly forgetting myself, lies in ut- 
terly unlearning and disusing all its elaborately petty 
schemes and dodges now grown so transparent that 
a child is not deceived by them : lies in fact in hon- 
estly identifying myself with others. I know it will 
never be possible for me to do this perfectly, that 
is, attain to self-extinction, because being created, I 
can never hope actually to become Divine; but at 
all events I shall become through eternal years more 
and more intimately one in nature, and I hope in 
spirit, with a being who is thoroughly destitute of 
this Uniting principle, that is, a being who is without 
selfhood save in His creatures. And certainly the 
next best thing to being God, is to know Him, for 
this knowledge makes one content with any burden 
of personal limitation. I all along admit of course 
that I, like every other man, have a natural capacity 
in myself for that harmless ruminant or reflective 
life, which to the sceptical or scientific mind is the 
very ideal human life. But I would have you most 
distinctly to understand that this respectable bovine 



TO CREATED OR SELF-CONSCIOUS EXISTENCE. 363 

style of existence, with the whole Divine-human aro- 
ma, or miraculous quality, of life left out of it, is not 
in the least my ideal. The idea of the life I my- 
self covet or aspire to, is that of free, unforced, ine- 
ffective, spontaneous goodness, realizable only through 
a Divine reconstruction of my nature. And I would 
infinitely rather die outright, accordingly, with no 
chance of any lesser resurrection, than yield one iota 
of this most lovely human hope and aspiration to 
the flimsy reasoners who lead our present intellectual 
decadence, and pitch the tune for the base unwhole- 
some crew to dance to, which with lower aims than 
theirs yet vaticinates in the same strain. 

I rejoice, then, with unspeakable joy in the gospel 
legend, or the fact of Christ's birth from a virgin, and 
of his resurrection from death : certainly not because 
of any literal or absolute worth the facts bear to my 
imagination, for in themselves they leave my imagi- 
nation wholly unimpressed, as they leave my reason 
baffled ; but because they alone suggest to my heart 
and mind the spiritual truth of God's infinitude. Ah! 
the marvellous truth which is avouched for us in 
the Christian legend ! The simply adorable and 
ineffable truth of God's natural manhood, of the 
Divine nature made human down to the veriest flesh 
and bones of humanity, and of our nature conse- 
quently exalted into the sole vehicle thenceforth of 



364 THE GOSPEL FACTS WORTHLESS SAVE AS 

God's spiritual perfection ! To think hereupon what 
a stupid dreary thing the human soul is reduced to 
after it has undergone scientific manipulation, and 
been run into a mere pruritus of the senses ! Ham- 
let the play with Hamlet the person left out is noth- 
ing in comparison. The melancholy thing in this 
case is — not that one's bread of life becomes mere 
unleavened dough, for one can exist well enough, 
if bare existence contents him, on unleavened 
bread j but that any considerable number of men 
should be so lacking in the sentiment of infinitude 
within their proper nature, as willingly to make 
sense, in which all animals are superior to them, the 
sovereign arbiter of truth in intellectual things ! I 
beg however that you will not think that it seems 
to me vitally important in what sense the existing 
battle between religious faith and science is settled. 
Neither party is contending for the interests of the 
living God, so spiritually active at present within the 
precincts of human nature, but only and at best for 
those of some traditional deity now deceased; the 
deity, for example, of orthodox ecclesiastical culture. 
The worship of this time-and-space deity at this day, 
and especially in this land, where human nature is 
vindicating with startling emphasis and iteration its 
immaculate Divine dignity against all manner of finite 
private or personal pretension in men, seems to me a 



A REVELATION OF GOD'S IOTINITUDE. I 365 

grievous anachronism, and is clearly not worth con- 
tending for. Take any chance dozen reputable men 
of the world (so-called) who practically deny the 
existence of any deity outside of our own nature; 
and then take any similar dozen of reputable religious 
men (so-called) who practically affirm the existence 
of a deity with distinctively supernatural and super- 
human attributes : and I defy you to discover any 
other and deeper practical difference between them. 
No, their sole visible difference is constituted by the 
presence or absence of the religious profession, to- 
gether with a certain stifling pious decorum which 
that profession imposes : not in the least by any 
characteristic spiritual superiority of either class to 
the other. So far as the interests and intercourse 
of this humdrum moral or superficial life are in ques- 
tion, I venture to say you would confide in one class 
quite as readily as in the other. But, unless I am 
greatly mistaken, you would intelligently confide in 
neither class, so far as their relations to man's un- 
seen and veracious spiritual being are concerned. 

I said a moment since that the gospel facts, the 
miraculous facts alleged in connection with Christ 
Jesus, did not in themselves pique either my aesthetic 
or rational interest. The reason doubtless is that the 
Christian facts are creative facts, ultimate facts of 
man's universal being, and make no appeal to my in- 



366 THE SCIENTIFIC OR ONTOLOGIC HYPOTHESIS 

dividual self-love, save in a reflex way. I am not 
spiritually a creature of God in my own right, or in 
my individual capacity, but only in so far as I become 
identified in affection and thought with universal man, 
or the interests of the Divine righteousness upon 
earth. The Christian facts must always be regarded, 
when regarded intelligently, as a rigid accommoda- 
tion of spiritual or supersensuous truth to man's 
natural or sensuous understanding : the truth accom- 
modated being that of God's infinitude, which makes 
Him a spiritual or living creator of men and by 
no means a natural or dead creator ; which, in fact, 
stamps the whole realm of nature as void of abso- 
lute significance, or turns it, solid foundation as it is 
for our senses, into a boundless mirage whenever 
we seek to get any direct spiritual instruction from 
it. In short the facts pointedly refuse to be inter- 
preted by any scientific or ontologic hypothesis of 
creation, which identifies the being of things with 
their existence in space and time, and thus quietly 
eliminates from the problem a spiritual or living 
and infinite creator. There is no more vicious 
habit of mind accordingly in the point of view of 
philosophy than that which drives us to speculate 
an ontologic basis to the spiritual creation, in think- 
ing it to be really or objectively identical with out- 
ward nature. Man is not naturally immortal, and 



OF BEING FUNDAMENTALLY STUPID AND VOID. 367 

only harm is done by leading him to think himself 
so. By natural birth, or in himself, he is to the last 
degree corrupt and perishable, and though his science 
demonstrates any amount of order, peace, and pro- 
ductive power in his animal and vegetable and min- 
eral connections, it is utterly powerless to promise 
himself any resurrection from the death which is la- 
tent in his own flesh and bones. To be sure science 
is just as impotent to menace him with a contrary 
fate, because as science is functionally confined to 
the realm of mortal existence, it must needs confess 
itself a mere idiotic guesser in relation to every 
interest of his unseen and immortal being. 

I do not say, then, that Jesus Christ is of any pri- 
vate consequence to me more than any other man is, 
or that I derive the least hope or comfort from his 
recorded life and conversation to my personal or self- 
ish desire of immortality. I have no doubt indeed 
that I shall live after death, with perhaps unhap- 
pily a greatly enhanced force of selfhood moreover, 
and quite independently of my inherited or culti- 
vated religious faith. But any amount of mere post- 
mortem consciousness would prove a sorry equivalent 
for immortalitv. Man realizes immortal life, I infer 
from the Christian facts, and somewhat from my own 
observation of human life as well, only under his 
own spiritual midwifery ; that is, only by voluntarily 



368 HOW MAN REALIZES IMMORTALITY. 

compelling himself against the inspiration of his self- 
hood, and frankly obeying the inflowing instincts of 
fellowship or society which alone unite him with his 
kind, or out of a very disgusting animal make him 
for the first time a man. In short, a man realizes 
life Divine and immortal only by coming to view 
himself as so much mere rubbish in comparison with 
his fellows, and clinging with renewed affections to 
his Divinely redeemed race or nature. It is astonish- 
ing what force and expansion this new and Divine 
love of one's kind imports into our ordinarily grace- 
less consciousness, or the unrelieved tenor of our 
daily life. How it enlarges the objective element in 
consciousness, and annihilates the subjective element 
comparatively, till at last every commonest natural 
form of use seems aromatic with Divinity, and all 
men who are not vowed to idleness or pleasure grow 
Divinely chaste, as all women are Divinely fair and 
modest. But I only want to say that incarnation 
avouches itself to the heart the sole philosophic secret 
of creation, and the Christian facts in embodying this 
secret in a cypher as it were until such time as the 
human mind had grown wise enough by experience 
to unriddle it, impose a definite end to men's crude 
speculations in seeking a scientific or ontological clew 
to the mysteries of creative and created being. 
Perhaps it will not be amiss to close this letter 



A PERSONAL REMINISCENCE. 369 

by a personal reminiscence having some relation to 
its theme. 

A good many years ago in Paris I lived in the 
same house with Mrs. — — , a most charming and 
amiable old lady, who was the mother by a former 
marriage of a very distinguished son, with whom I 
had been for several years on terms of friendly ac- 
quaintance, and who was polite enough to insist on 
my making his mother's acquaintance also. The 
mother was a remarkably handsome woman, of the 
gentlest address and manners, but she very soon 
revealed to me that her peace of mind had been very 
much disturbed by doubts of the religious dogmas 
in which she was bred, and to which she tried to 
continue faithful. I usually endeavored to relieve her 
depressed spirits by talk about her son, whom she 
almost idolized, and about the very remarkable lec- 
tures he had given in New York, and other cheerful 
topics, but somehow our conference always reverted 
to a discussion of her religious perplexities, which 
were indeed sufficiently sombre and menacing. Her 
husband, who seemed a very amiable man, was a 
half-pay officer in the English army, altogether vowed 
to reading, and not much disposed to interest him- 
self in drawing-room gossip. One evening I had 
mounted to their apartment, and found there an Irish 
lady, of extremely prepossessing appearance, who was 



370 ANECDOTE OF A MURDERER'S MUNDANE 

the wife of the Paris correspondent of one of the 
London daily papers, and who apparently was enter- 
taining our hostess with some account of Sweden- 
borg's books. She seemed to know something of 
what she talked about, and had evidently read Swe- 
denborg's writings with a certain interest and in- 
struction. But I thought upon the whole that she 
presented her subject in too sentimental a light to 
attract her friend's serious attention, and it occurred 
to me to tell a story which might give a somewhat 
grimmer and more realistic impression of his lore. 
It was a narrative I had lately found in one of 
Swedenborg's private diaries, if I am not mistaken, 
of a murderer's entrance into the spiritual world, 
whose execution took place in Stockholm, and whose 
courage had evidently been buoyed by a very strong 
confidence that the rope would break, and the hour 
appointed for his execution elapse before it could be 
repaired or readjusted. Accordingly when the drop 
fell, and set the criminal free for his spiritual career, 
Swedenborg, who watched all the details of the in- 
cident through the eyes of his attendant spirits, saw 
him pick himself up in the other world with great 
alacrity, and betake himself to running towards the 
open country as if to put the greatest possible space 
between himself and the Stockholm rabble. His zeal 
in running became so furious as to attract attention, 



POST-MORTEM PERTURBATIONS. 371 

and some good spirits at length put after him to 
chase him down, and ascertain what fly had bitten him 
that he ran with such reckless speed. He was not 
long in yielding to their friendly overtures, but in- 
sisted that he should not be taken back to Stockholm, 
saying that the rope had broken, and the time was 
now past that had been appointed for his execution. 
The good people who had interested themselves in 
him perceived at once that he had taken a longer 
leap than he himself was at all aware of, and very 
soon left him in the hands of certain spirits of his 
own kidney to whose company he betrayed a much 
stronger liking. 

The story was not perhaps exhilarating as a story, 
but I had no sooner begun it than I observed the 
husband of our hostess lift his eyes from the open 
book before him, and sit in an attitude of great ex- 
pectancy till I had ended. Then he rose and shut 
his book, at the same time saying to me, that if he 
could believe the incident I had related, it would 
be all over with his doubts about immortality, for 
the incident in question bore very strongly upon the 
only two points on which his doubts pivoted : first, 
that of the persistence of man's personal identity 
beyond the grave; and, second, the persistence of 
his conscious freedom. If, therefore, he could only 
believe that Swedenborg had actually witnessed the 



372 NO DEGREE OF POST-MORTEM EXPERIENCE 



occurrence I related, he would be extremely happy- 
but ah ! the way to believe Swedenborg ! 

I told him that I had not reckoned upon interest- 
ing him in my poor little anecdote, but that it was 
intended to placate the anxieties of his wife which 
were always the effect of an influx of evil spirits, by 
suggesting to her mind the fact of the death -process 
being in every case so very humane and natural as 
to leave even a criminal like this vile murderer ut- 
terly undisturbed as to his habitual thought and con- 
sciousness, and intent still only upon cheating the 
hangman. I furthermore remarked that I had my- 
self no doubt of the absolute reality of this incident 
to Swedenborg's experience, because I could not con- 
ceive of the creator of men once endowing them with 
conscious life or freedom, and then conceive of Him as 
again under any possible circumstances revoking His 
gift. But I also told him that I had been not a 
little interested to discover that so intelligent a person 
as he should be prepared to say that all his desires 
after immortality would be met in his experience of 
the indefinite persistence of the natural life. Doubt- 
less Swedenborg's Arcana Ccelestia were apt to breed 
a pretty firm conviction in the mind of the reader 
that an orderly conscious existence, however variously 
motived on the part of the subject, is the assured 
providential destiny of all men after death. But I 



EQUIVALENT TO IMMORTAL LIFE. 373 

should never think of recommending a course of Swe- 
denborg in order to produce that conviction simply, 
under the impression that it was at all equivalent 
to a belief in eternal life. Swedenborg never by any 
chance represents one's post-mortem existence, how- 
ever circumstantially defined it may be, as guarantee- 
ing him against the chances of the second death, or 
as being by any means the same thing with his 
immortal life. Indeed our immortal interests, ac- 
cording to Swedenborg's showing, are much more 
nearly dependent upon our cis- mortem ideas and 
practices, than they are upon any imaginable amount 
of trans-mortem experience, were it the very happiest. 
For immortal life, to every one who experiences it, 
is the realization of his true or spiritual and God- 
given individuality, that which has been at most 
merely symbolized by his natural selfhood, but never 
in the faintest degree constituted by it. So that 
whatever a man's natural selfhood may be in a moral 
or outward aspect, determining him possibly in one 
case straight to heaven, in the other straight to hell, 
it will be utterly without any power to determine his 
relation to God, or his chances of immortality. 

Immortal life to Swedenborg always means one 
definite thing, and that is — soul-power, or the prev- 
alence of a man's inward life over his outward one. 
It means : the souVs exclusive power to regulate a 



374 IMMORTALITY DEPENDS UPON NO 

mans outward, that is, his physical and moral, rela- 
tions, and so produce an ever-growing inward and 
ineffable harmony betioeen him and his creative source : 
so that any man in whom this result in any sincere 
degree however slight is freely achieved, or his soul 
has learned to rule and his body to obey, has ipso 
facto entered upon immortal life ; and this man only. 
How then shall one attain to this soul-power ? 

Certainly not through the exhibition of any vicious 
personal favour on God's part towards him: for in 
the first place God has no such personal favour to 
bestow on any man, were he in all moral regards the 
pattern man of his race ; and in the second place if 
He had any such personal favour to bestow, the 
exhibition of it toward His favourite would only re- 
sult in more effectually damning the unhappy wretch 
to hell, by infallibly engendering within him a meri- 
torious spirit or se^-righteous estimate of himself 
in comparison with other less favoured men. I hope 
we may be careful each of us never to flatter him- 
self accordingly that he is the beloved of God, 
and the favourite of heaven : it were better for our 
spiritual sanity in that case that a millstone were 
hung about our necks, and we ourselves sunk in 
the bottom of the sea. The only man who was 
ever born to such an ominous unhallowed prestige 
was Jesus Christ; and he worked himself clear of 



PERSONAL FAVOUR OF GOD TO US. 375 

the deep spiritual damnation that inhered in it, only 
by making his life from the cradle to the grave one 
of exquisite self-denial, or of earnest and assiduous 
contention — contention even to death — against the 
rank personal homage and consecrated self-esteem 
which the fanatical Jews endeavoured to thrust upon 
him. He was born apparently for nothing else than 
to flatter the God-ward hopes of the most devout and 
diabolical people that ever lived: that is, to give 
them their long-promised, at all events their long- 
expected, dominion over all other people. His birth 
had been so marvellous, and had been welcomed by 
such a famished expectation on the part of his self- 
righteous nation, that if his fidelity to truth had only 
left him free to forego his denunciations of their 
national pretension to be God's saints, and defer to 
the obvious voice of prophecy in their behalf, taking 
the literal text of their sacred books for his guidance, 
he might doubtless have been lifted to an unparalleled 
height of empire. And no doubt the devil of his 
secret thoughts, the devil born with his Jewish blood, 
often tempted him to listen to these fleshly ambitions, 
often took him up into an exceedingly high mountain, 
the mountain of his inherited personal pride and lust 
of dominion, and showing him thence all the king- 
doms of the world and the glory of them, said unto 
him : All these will I give t/iee, if thou wilt be guided 



376 CHRIST'S UNIQUE LUSTRE, THAT HE 

by me. But although these things must have tried 
him as never man before or since was tried (for 
only think what a nation of devout and selfish zealots 
— the worst possible combination of the elements of 
human character conceivable, breeding by their con- 
junction the most genuine diabolism — he had to 
back him, if he would only consent to follow their 
sacred oracles, and fulfil the literal Divine promises 
which had been made to them), he never flinched, 
but knowing his tormentors, who they were, and that 
they were pre-eminently of his own filthy race, inva- 
riably replied to them : Get thee behind me, Satan, 
for it is written thus and so ; and I came to do the 
tvill of Him that sent me, and not at all my own tvill. 

This was the merit of Christ, that he found the 
most assured religious hope and aspiration of his 
people, based upon their sacred scriptures, found all 
his instincts of patriotism, all his family instincts, all 
his instincts of neighborhood and friendship, to be on 
the side of his unlimited self-love and love of the 
world, on the devil's side in short, and yet his truth 
of soul was so single and spotless, his perspicacity so 
unerring, that he never for a moment faltered, but 
threw religion, country, family, friends, incontinently 
overboard, or rather gave them each a new and spirit- 
ual Divine reproduction, that so in solitude, in suffer- 
ing, in ceaseless anguish of soul, he might obey his 



DESPISED MAN'S MORAL RIGHTEOUSNESS. 377 

inward instinct of the Divine name, and bequeath 
his immortal sorrows alone to mankind as the only 
fit interpretation and remembrancer of that name. 
If he had, but once barely, clasped joy instead of 
sorrow to his bosom, if he had only once preferred 
Jew to Gentile, self to neighbour, truth to goodness, 
where should we ever again have looked for a rev- 
elation of God's true or spiritual infinitude? and 
without such a revelation where would be the intel- 
lect and heart of man at this day ? I do not hesitate 
to reply, for myself: In the grave of his burnt-out 
natural appetites and passions. 

But you may be in the habit of intellectually ap- 
preciating the Christian truth differently from me, 
and I will at once, therefore, answer your question, 
namely : How does a man attain to that soul-power, 
which, and nothing else, is immortal life ? 

It is by the inward perception of himself as a 
person whose nature has been hopelessly depraved or 
corrupted before it came to his hands, by its individual 
subjects in the first place having the presumption 
to conceive themselves to be in their own right crea- 
tures of the most high God ; and then in the second 
place by these individual subjects having the pre- 
sumption to live a life of serene and total spiritual 
indifference to the obligations of such creatureship. 
For this is the only real atheism, or vital profligacy, 



378 NO MAN A CREATURE OF GOD IN HIS 

of the human heart: to be ready to acknowledge 
oneself in-oneselfa, creature of God, and yet not to 
be infinitely chagrined and distressed by the acknowl- 
edgment. I can imagine no more revolting idea to 
my own mind than that of my individual creature- 
ship; of my having a creative right to be or exist 
in myself, that is, independently of other men, and 
independently besides of mineral and vegetable and 
animal : because the prime and instant logical impli- 
cation of such an idea would plainly be to eviscerate 
myself of selfhood, that is, both of physical and moral 
life, for a created being has no right either to one 
or the other. A created being, if any such could 
exist, would be a being so dead in himself that the 
very stones of the street would hiss their contempt 
at him; a being of such essential dependence from 
stem to stern, or through and through, that the bare 
conception of his real existence either to sense or 
consciousness would be intellectual delirium or fatu- 
ity. The only thing that makes the acknowledg- 
ment of my own creatureship tolerable or excusable 
to myself in thought, is that I am myself a wholly 
unreal or insubstantial phenomenon, whose unreality 
moreover is shared and intensified not only by every 
partaker of human nature, but by every beast of the 
field, and every fowl of the air, and every fish of 
the sea. For the conception of anything as Divinely 



OWN RIGHT, OR INDEPENDENTLY OF OTHERS. 379 

created involves for its interpretation that posterior 
and more spiritual conception of Divine power which 
we call redemption, and which perfects the former 
conception by showing the creator intent upon ex- 
tricating His creatures from the base animal investi- 
ture or deciduous mother-substance in which their 
mere creation leaves them. Both terms are derived 
from the limitations of man's subjective consciousness, 
and are both accommodations of spiritual truth to 
that consciousness, without the slightest literal or 
objective reality in them; being both intended to 
induct the mind into the conception of the Divine- 
human infinitude which underlies our nature, and 
of the irresistible power w T hich is spiritually mould- 
ing it into social and orderly form. 

I cling to my selfhood then, not in the least as 
affording any sign of my own reality to myself, but 
simply as the sole evidence and guarantee of Divin- 
ity or infinitude within my nature ; and in this point 
of view I cling to it as tenaciously as ever my fa- 
bled progenitor in the garden of Eden clung to 
his Divinely-given Eve. Eor in this point of view 
a man's selfhood is always a common possession of 
his nature in him, and no way his own spiritual or 
private and particular possession; a mere outgrowth 
and necessity of his mortal consciousness or appari- 
tion, and by no means an appanage of his Divine or 



380 GOD'S NEW CHURCH A THOROUGHLY 

immortal being. And this is why I say that it is 
only by the honest and sincere handling of himself 
as a naturally depraved subject, that a man ever 
practically attains to immortal life. For only in this 
way can he ever be led to disesteem and disregard 
that shabby self-righteous or mingled moralistic and 
pietistic culture which the church commends to his 
regard as the aim and end of his being, and which 
the church's necessities alone keep alive in the earth ; 
and fix his thought upon the spiritual evils which 
inhere in his fallacious natural selfhood, especially 
after this selfhood has undergone regeneration by the 
church : which are in truth the only things that stand 
between him and the full fruition of immortal life. 

Mr. listened to what I said with grave polite- 
ness outwardly, but with the inward air, I must say, 
of listening to one talking downright nonsense ; but 
the lovely person who sat beside his wife on the 
sofa took occasion to say that she had not entered 
so deeply as I seemed to have done into the philo- 
sophic purport of the Swedenborgian literature, but 
that she would ponder what she had heard. I 
thanked her most unaffectedly, but took the liberty 
of cautioning her at the same time to be more solici- 
tous in all her readings of Swedenborg to read with 
free open insight or understanding than with zealous 
literal apprehensiveness, for if we came to Sweden- 



NEW NATURAL SPIRIT OR LIFE IN MAN. 381 

borg with any idea that he addressed a single word 
to our natural ears, and not exclusively to our spirit- 
ual-rational senses, we were assuredly done for before 
we began. And I had accordingly discovered that 
among the very few persons I knew who unblush- 
ingly called themselves literal adherents of Sweden- 
borg there was not one, singularly enough, who, so 
far as I perceived, manifested the slightest spiritual 
discernment of that author's meaning. And there- 
upon I wished my friends good-night. 



LETTER XXV 




?Y DEAR FRIEND : — The subject of my 
sixteenth letter was the church in antag- 
onism with the prevalent tendencies of 
human nature, which are selfishness and 
worldliness. And the tenor of the letter was to 
show that whereas the church combats and sup- 
plants these purely natural evils in man, all its 
ability to do so comes from its quietly and uncon- 
sciously originating a far deeper spiritual evil in 
him, infinitely worse than the other two : the evil 
of proprium, that is, of private selfhood or unrelated, 
independent character. Men do not get their private 
selfhood (that is, what gives to every man his dis- 
tinctive worth or reality from every other) from their 
nature, because their nature is what they all possess 
in common, and therefore distinguishes none. In 
fact human nature is merely the principle of iden- 
tity or community among men, and so intense, all- 
pervading, and exacting is it that whatever be man's 



CHURCH DEVELOPMENT OF OUE NATURE. 383 

private, individual, or spiritual pretensions it will 
insist first of all upon holding him to a perfectly 
rigid accountability to itself, allowing no one a spir- 
itual passport until he has paid every jot or tittle 
of his just dues to men's natural brotherhood.* If 
then men possess a distinctive selfhood or joroprium, 
that is, a private substance or reality individualizing 
or differencing them one from another, now in a 
favorable sense, now in an unfavorable, it is clear 
that the possession cannot be in any case an original 
fruit of their nature, but of some subsequent Divine 
or authoritative modification of their nature. -Now 
the only claim to be such modification of human 
nature is that put forward by the church. The 
church unquestionably and plausibly claims to be a 
Divine institution, engineered in the express inten- 
tion of modifying human nature or abating its in- 
fluence over its subjects with a view to their spir- 
itual enfranchisement; and there is accordingly no 
shadow of a reason possible why we should not 
hold the church liable by its own showing for the 
origination of private selfhood or personality among 

* That is to say : nature is a dread unfaltering nemesis to those 
■who are in any way ambitious to achieve an exceptional personal holi- 
ness, or aspire to compass direct spiritual relations with God : relations 
independent of, and uncontrolled by, their previous natural obligations 
to human society, fellowship, or equality. 



384 CHRISTIANITY SPIRITUALLY FULFILLED 

men ; that is, for their pretension to enjoy an indi- 
vidual character, standing, and responsibility before 
God. 

Now I will not attempt to disguise my conviction 
that this statement will prove very offensive to two 
large and influential classes of persons among us ; 
nor will I affect a cynical indifference to such a 
result. For the classes I shall most offend embrace 
all the conventionally respectable people of the earth, 
my own humble friends and brethren among the 
rest ; and it is idle to pretend that one's own blood, 
that is, one's conventional standing, is not dear to 
him, or is not very costly to lose. But my humilia- 
tion on this account admits of a striking alleviation : 
it is directly in the line of Christian tradition. We 
know from the gospels that the fight of Jesus Christ 
— parva componere magnis — was with the scribes 
and Pharisees, that is, the leaders of his people, or 
those particularly identified with the Jewish church 
and state. Now that these were the most respecta- 
ble persons of his nation, and naturally therefore the 
most remunerative to any ordinary man's self-love, 
is perhaps sufficiently indicated by the fact of his 
provoking their incurable pride and resentment in 
professing to be the special friend of publicans and 
sinners. But we have more direct evidence of their 
untarnished conventional respectability. For Jesus 



IN THE EVENTS OF OUK OWN HISTORY. 385 

Christ himself testified that the righteousness of 
these men was the highest righteousness convention- 
ally recognized on earth, when he said that even 
that would not qualify a man for the skies. Verily, 
verily, I say unto you that unless^ your righteousness 
exceed that of the scribes and Pharisees, ye shall 
in no wise enter into the kingdom of heaven. Now 
I am by no means so presumptuous as to aspire to 
following Christ literally; but I will allow no man 
— especially no respectable or conventionally right- 
eous man — to deny me the praise of following him 
spiritually. There is no such thing possible to men 
nowadays as a literal following of Christ. This pre- 
tension had a semblance of possibility only while 
Christ was in the flesh, or lent himself in finite 
visible form to the tentative faith of his bewildered 
disciples. But even then how continually did he 
feel himself called upon to buffet their carnal ideas 
of his kingdom and authority, by summoning them 
to a spiritual following ! But at this day the voca- 
tion of following Christ literally has become abso- 
lutely too absurd. I think even that it has grown 
to all modest minds a revolting and disreputable 
cant. For his friends and his foes are now both 
alike spiritual; being in no wise friends or foes of 
his proper person, but only of that Divine or infinite 
love towards the human race which he first livingly 



386 CHRIST'S SPIRITUAL FOES ARE THEY 

exhibited in such adequate or self-sacrificing linea- 
ments as to constitute him an eternal symbol or 
revelation of God's name. 

Who then are Christ's spiritual foes, the only foes 
possible to him at this day? They are friends — 
in varying sort, some respectful and distant, others 
attached and obsequious — -to Ids carnal or historic 
personality. The first class may for convenience' 
sake be called moralistic : being made up of that 
very large number of persons who live and thrive 
in contentment with the existing very infirm con- 
stitution of society : poets, literary essayists, scholars, 
artists, transcendental aspirants or idealists, men of 
science, men of merchandise and trade, men of un- 
controlled wealth, of idle lives, voluptuaries, in short 
men of whatever commonplace habitual and enforced 
routine : all of whom blindly regard morality as the 
absolute law of human life, and look upon duty as 
the highest expression of human character, especially 
for other people. 

The second class is mainly ecclesiastical, of course, 
and lives and thrives in sage contentment, not with 
this world to be sure, but with another one which 
by all accounts is greatly more unequal or undivine 
and vicious even than this. It comprises all those 
of every sect who regard the traditional church as 
directly in the line of man's spiritual welfare, or as 



WHO GREATLY EXALT HIS FINITE PERSON. 387 

supplying by Divine appointment a literal pathway 
to heaven. 

I offend men of the former category in maintaining 
that morality is not absolute ; that is, that it does 
not constitute its own end in the existing constitu- 
tion of things, but is rigidly subservient to a higher 
style of life in man in which spontaneity displaces 
will, and duty succumbs to delight. 

I offend men of the latter category in maintaining 
that the church is not in a spiritual point of view 
(however much it may be in a moral) directly min- 
isterial to human welfare, but only indirectly so. I 
hold that the church indirectly promotes human wel- 
fare in the highest degree, indeed, by ultimating or 
bringing to a head in her own vicious personality 
the deepest spiritual evils of our nature, and so 
affording the Divine providence an opportunity to 
deal summarily with the evils in her representative 
personality alone, instead of vaguely and indefinitely 
combating them in the endless forms of our indi- 
vidual manhood. But this notion is of course of 
deadly augury to the ecclesiastical mind. 

You see then that the opposition between these 
two categories of thought and feeling and my own 
thought and feeling could hardly be more pro- 
nounced than it is; and if my reliance were not 
solely in the omnipotence of truth I could easily 



388 EKROK m POINT OF PHILOSOPHY 

despair of ever being able by any efforts of mine 
to bring our discords into harmony. 

First let us endeavor in an amicable spirit to 
correct the error of the moralist, who may be called 
this-world's worldling ; after which we shall see what 
can be done to dispose of the churchman, who in 
like manner may be styled the other -world' s world- 
ling. I deal with the first of these errorists first, 
because he is altogether the easiest to deal with; 
inasmuch as moralism is a mere parasitic disease 
of the mind, or has absolutely nothing to account 
for its existence or give it an intellectual locus standi, 
but the development of the church in our nature 
and history. That is to say, the church historically 
breeds, sweats, or throws off from its own flanks, 
the civilized state of man ; and morality is the un- 
questionable law of civilization, the absolute sub- 
stance, condition, and measure of all our civic right- 
eousness. It is only in recent years comparatively, 
while the church as an institution has been provi- 
dentially declining in men's estimation, or ceasing 
spiritually to function, that morality has been pro- 
moted to the guardianship of men's spiritual interests 
no less than their natural. The whole Unitarian 
movement in the church was a development of the 
church's latent spiritual stupidity and senility, no 
longer able indeed spiritually to discern between 



OF THE MORALIST OR STATESMAN: 389 

its right hand and its left; for what can be more 
hugely preposterous than the logic upon which that 
movement was founded, namely : that one and the 
same law operated man's spiritual and material life? 

But this is not our immediate theme. Our theme 
at present is the civic state of man which the Chris- 
tian church has bred and nurtured, and of which 
morality is the unchangeable fundamental law; and 
we must rigidly cleave to it as time and space are 
failing us, and both my nerves and your patience 
doubtless are seriously pleading for a good long 
holiday. 

No evil attaches to man in God's sight but the 
evil of a finite or infirm nature, and this is an evil 
which being natural attaches to all men alike with- 
out distinction of persons. This natural or generic 
evil of man has various specific forms of manifesta- 
tion, such as false-witness, theft, adultery, murder, 
and covetousness. But under none of these forms 
does the evil out of natural become spiritual in the 
Divine sight, and attach to its individual subject, 
unless the individual subject himself really and 
unmistakably avouch his love for it; that is, make 
it his own in heart as well as in act, or inwardly 
no less than outwardly. In that case a man's adul- 
tery, or untruth, or what not, signalizes a deeper 
evil in him than any which is imposed by his na- 



390 THAT HE THINKS CIVILIZATION BASED 

ture, namely, a spiritual evil, which is the evil of 
a confirmed selfhood or proprium. Tor no man is 
spiritually hurt or degraded by subjection to any 
form of natural evil, unless he remain impenitent 
for it : that is, so love the particular evil as to make 
it his own or identify himself with it. 

But with spiritual evil in man we are not called 
upon to busy ourselves just here. We shall say 
what we have to say about it farther on when we 
address ourselves to understanding the error of the 
churchman. Just now I have to do with the mor- 
alist alone, who vehemently distrusts me because I 
maintain that what we call moral evil (say the evil 
of false witness, theft, adultery, or murder) does not 
attach to the moral subject in God's sight, unless 
he be spiritually depraved as well : that is, make 
self the end of his activity in preference to God and 
the neighbor : but attaches to human nature itself. 

The reason why the man of the world condemns 
this doctrine is that it makes intellectual havoc, if 
it be accepted, with the claims of our existing civ- 
ilization to be a finality of the Divine administra- 
tion in human nature. Our civilization is based he 
thinks upon the absoluteness of morality, that is, 
upon the truth that a man's moral, or outward and 
actual, relations to his fellow-man are of paramount 
Divine obligation upon him, and that any contrary 



UPON THE ABSOLUTENESS OF MOLALITY. 391 

idea to this in weakening the foundations of civic 
order would expose us to the Divine judgment. No 
one can doubt that a man's moral character as good 
or evil is based, and based exclusively, upon the 
outward and actual relations he sustains to society 
or his fellow-man : the man being characteristically 
good if he actually or outwardly abstain in his inter- 
course with his kind from the evils of lying, theft, 
adultery, murder, and covetousness, and character- 
istically bad if he does not so abstain. But this 
does not prove by any means that our civilization 
is based upon the absoluteness of morality, or upon 
the idea that duty is the Divine ideal of human 
action. 

In the first place, if morality were absolute in its 
demands upon human nature, and duty constituted 
the Divine ideal of human action, then the teaching 
of the church, and the soothing ministry of its clergy 
at our death-beds, would be wholly out of place in 
civilized life. For civilization being based upon the 
absoluteness of the moral sentiment the instinct of 
self-defence or its own preservation would keep it 
from tolerating any influence which went to the 
weakening of this sentiment. But the church, at 
least the church in its orthodox aspect, is practi- 
cally the sworn foe of the moral pretension in men. 
The church, so long at all events as it witnessed 



392 THE CHURCH PRIMARILY AND 

to man's spiritual life, allowed no moral differences 
among men to intervene between the soul and God, 
or complicate the gospel blessings to universal man. 
Its founder earned the odium of all the morally 
righteous men of his nation by proclaiming hmir 
self the friend of publicans and sinners, and it 
would be indeed difficult, nay impossible to dis- 
cover why his gospel was called a gospel, if it had 
not been addressed primarily to the special relief 
of those who had a conscience of sin towards God 
only because they had violated the law upon which 
their national dignity was founded. And the apos- 
tles of Christ emulating the teaching of their mas- 
ter, and inspired by him, everywhere instructed the 
awakened conscience of their Jewish converts that 
what the law notoriously could not do in that it was 
weak through the flesh : namely, beget a man to 
spiritual peace and hope in God: this the gospel 
infallibly did, and thereby avouched its' eternal 
supremacy to the law as a mode of intercourse 
between man and God. It is idle then for the 
moralist to appeal to the church for confirmation 
to his doctrine that morality is the absolute law of 
human life, or furnishes an adequate rule to the 
soul in its aspirations after spiritual life. For the 
church, so long as it continued to be worthy of its 
name in the Divine sight, and evinced such worthi- 



INVETERATELY HOSTILE TO MORALISM. 393 

ness by providentially succeeding to the inheritance 
of the Roman empire, always persisted in stigma- 
tizing that doctrine as of especially treacherous au- 
gury to the Christian tradition upon which its own 
fortunes were founded. 

The truth is that the theoretic moralist is totally 
out of place in this spiritual day and generation ; 
as much out of place as an owl or a bat would be 
after natural daybreak. His visual organs served 
him excellently well during the spiritual night of 
the mind to discriminate between moonlight or star- 
light and shade; but now that the full splendor 
of spiritual daylight is inwardly bursting upon the 
soul they are of no avail but to make him a 
laughing-stock to the unsympathetic or unfeeling. 
He insists upon holding natural daylight and spir- 
itual to be one and the same thing, or of one and 
the same essential quality though admitting of quan- 
titative differences ; and consequently does not see 
that they require different visual organs for their 
discernment : one exclusively outward or material, 
the other exclusively inward or rational. What 
originally stultifies our belated critic and friend, 
and makes him spiritually so owlish or bat-like in 
appearance, is the fixed idea with him that creation 
is primarily natural, and spiritual only by derivation 
from that. Whereas, the spiritual truth would teach 



394 THE LATEST CHURCH DEVELOPMENT 

him, if he were only willing to receive it, that our 
being is altogether spiritual or real, while it is our 
mere superficial or supposititious existence alone 
which is natural or phenomenal. Still it is vastly 
better for the moralist to cling to his fixed idea 
of creation being originally natural, than it would 
be for him to abandon it save at the instance of 
the spiritual truth upon the subject. For in that 
case he would be left destitute of all reverence for 
the Divine name even as an outward power, and 
sink rapidly into the condition of a mere spiritual 
tramp and vagabond preying remorselessly upon the 
peace, order, and innocence of civilized mankind. 

But all men in this day of the church's spiritual 
imbecility are more or less moralistic. The Uni- 
tarian or latest form of church development which 
represents the church in its vastated spiritual plight 
more faithfully than is at all agreeable to the or- 
thodox imagination, has pushed moralism so far as 
to have almost openly declined, itself, into a mere 
school of good manners, while the orthodox congre- 
gations by a necessary reaction have been driven to 
contra-distinguish themselves by a gospel of fervent 
but puerile ritualism. Thus between the "world" 
and the " church " the only discernible spiritual dif- 
ference is that while the former continues to be 
seriously moralistic in its doctrinal beliefs as to 



PROVES ITS UTTER SPIRITUAL DECEASE. 395 

another life, the latter grows more and more frivo- 
lously so. The consequence is that the church tra- 
dition of God's spiritual or creative infinitude is 
now practically discredited and as it were discarded 
among men, and the great creator of men has 
accordingly sunk into a mere moral pedagogue or 
schoolmaster intent upon publicly vindicating his 
own paltry self-consequence by rewarding his friends 
and punishing his enemies. It is rare indeed to 
meet with any one who, speculatively at least, does 
not look upon our shabby moral history as a source 
of legitimate pride to us rather than humility ; 
who does not regard conscience as designedly a 
ministry of righteousness rather than sin, of justi- 
fication not of condemnation, of life not death; and 
who is not unfeignedly surprised therefore when 
any sincere votary of it is found incurring death 
at its hands. There is doubtless good ground for 
surprise, and even shock, when any one of assured 
civic standing, enjoying the esteem of his fellow-citi- 
zens, turns out so wantonly imprudent as to violate 
the moral law, and expose himself to men's reproach. 
Imprudent, I allow, even to the pitch of insanity 
every such man must be; but there is no need 
of imputing the least spiritual turpitude to him. 
Falsehood, fraud, adultery, murder, covetousness, are 
vices exclusively of our moral or voluntary constitu- 



396 OUR HIGHEST MORALITY CLAIMS 

tion ; and a liability to them therefore does not any 
more argue spiritual depravity in a man, than a lia- 
bility to small-pox, which is a vice of our physical 
constitution, argues moral depravity. Many a violator 
of the law moreover suffers so poignant a sense of 
guilt as to be willing even — if that were possible — 
to give his life a ransom for his offence. And clearly 
the spiritual state of such a man is infinitely more 
hopeful than that of any person, who himself as yet 
un drilled or inexperienced in the deadly letter of the 
law, and grossly ignorant therefore of its redeeming 
spirit, triumphs over him, or withdraws his fellowship 
from him. 

In fact human nature has so inward, so spiritual, 
so living a root in the infinite mercy of God; that 
the average man does not find it easy to obey an 
outward law, a law which aims to regulate his in- 
tercourse with others. No one seems able to do so 
sincerely who does not do it on religious grounds; 
that is, who does not put a great deal of conscience 
towards God into his conformity, and obey chiefly for 
his soul's sake. Other people do not necessarily dis- 
obey it by any means, but their apparent conformity 
to it is in reality a conformity to something else. 
We all of us well-to-do-people for example habit- 
ually maintain a good moral repute in the community, 
but then it is by virtue of the prudential instinct 



NO HIGHER SANCTION THAN PRUDENCE. 397 

in us, or an ever active self-love. We are kept, the 
mass of us, honest, chaste, and gentle because it is 
our interest to be well-esteemed by our fellow-men. 
The esteem of others is so dear to me, for instance, 
that I could almost die rather than do anything vol- 
untarily to impair my conventional standing; at all 
events my children's. But what I mean when I say 
that no one sincerely obeys the moral law but by the 
grace of God, is that no one is capable of giving it 
a hearty allegiance, a spontaneous or disinterested 
obedience, until the force of selfhood in him is effect- 
ually broken and routed. And this consideration 
ought by the way to be allowed much more weight 
in all questions of practical casuistry than we usually 
concede to it. It is not enough to stamp a man a 
liar to a spiritual regard that he should have told 
a lie on a certain occasion ; nor a thief, an adulterer, a 
murderer that he should have committed the offences 
designated by those names. For these offences are 
for the most part committed inadvertently, that is, 
in utter ignorance of their spiritual quality ; what 
is really false in them, or fraudulent, or adulterous, 
or murderous, being so obscured and swallowed up 
for the time by their subtle and extreme agreeable- 
ness to sense, as to seem an actual good. And surely 
men will forgive any weakness to the average human 
will, when it is thus placed in hand-to-hand conflict 



398 MORAL OFFENCES NOT CONTRARY 

with the tremendous force of the physical organiza- 
tion on the one side, and is unbacked on the other 
by a living faith in God. For my own part, and I 
do not know that I fall below the moral average of 
men, I have always found myself thoroughly impotent, 
when tempted, to overcome evil simply as evil ; and 
for this excellent reason, that when I have been 
tempted by evil it was never under its own linea- 
ments, but always in the counterfeit guise of good : 
so that my only chance to avoid it lay at last in giving 
submissive heed to the voice of my religious con- 
science, which tells me that whatsoever the flesh 
reckons to be supremely good is ipso facto spiritually 
evil. 

I say emphatically: when tempted; observe that. 
There are very many persons who will not understand 
this limitation — their number seems indeed to be 
growing; at least I think it could never have been 
so great as now — inasmuch as they themselves are 
exempt from moral conflict, and do not know except 
from hearsay what false-witness, or theft, or adultery, 
or murder is. These persons exhibit a great natural 
advance upon the average man, being of an almost 
purely aesthetic turn, with the ordinary moral virus 
all left out. Of course they know very well what is 
signified to the ear by the offences in question, but 
they have no idea of the spiritual substance which 



TO NATURE BUT TO CULTURE. 399 

is covered by them. They suppose that false-witness 
and theft and adultery and murder are not only so 
many literal words but so many veritable things as 
well, physically determined; which a vulgar sort of 
people are prone to do, but to which they themselves 
have not only no leaning, but a marked distaste and 
repugnance. 

But this in my opinion is a very superficial judg- 
ment. N'est j)as pecheur qui vent. No such thing 
is known to nature as false-witness, as theft, as adul- 
tery, or murder; otherwise of course animals might 
incur guilt. And surely no well-wisher of these could 
desire to see their innocent life converted into a moral 
and rational one. The offences in question are not 
the least physical, as against nature, but strictly 
moral, as against culture. They characterize man 
not as he stands inwardly affected to the interests 
of Divine justice in the earth, or the evolution of 
human society; but as he stands outwardly related 
to a strictly factitious or conventional order of human 
life which is called the State, and to which he is born 
subject: and they have no shadow of philosophic 
pertinency but in application to such subjection on 
his part. In other words the terms indicate so many 
strictly instituted or legal offences of men : the tem- 
porary order of which they confess themselves viola- 
tions having been providentially instituted, not with 



400 MEANING OF OUR 

any view to bound men's aspirations, or define their 
just hopes and expectations towards God, but rather 
with a view to foreshadow a permanent or Divine- 
natural order of human life one # day to appear in 
the earth, and by the insufficiences of the present 
order gradually prepare them for it. In short the 
existing order of human life is essentially educative 
or disciplinary : its whole practical purpose being to 
lead the mind out of carnal into spiritual ideas of 
justice or righteousness ; or what is the same thing 
out of selfish into social conceptions of human life. 

I repeat then that false-witness, theft, adultery, 
murder, and covetousness are not the least physical 
offences, or offences against nature, but purely moral 
offences, or offences against law. They are vices of 
our civic constitution exclusively, and therefore be- 
long quite equally to all the subjects of that consti- 
tution, if not actually yet potentially : in which case 
of course we have none of us any more right to boast 
ourselves inwardly over our neighbor in respect to 
moral purity, than we have a right to boast ourselves 
outwardly over him in respect to physical health. 
And if you, dear friend, ask me hereupon to state 
more explicitly what I mean by our civic constitu- 
tion, I will do so with all necessary fulness and dis- 
patch. 

By our civic constitution I mean the form of public 



CIVIC CONSTITUTION. 401 

order under which you and I have always lived, and 
which is called civilization, because it suspends every 
man's consideration upon, the relation he voluntarily 
sustains to the State, regarded as the power of a 
present Divine life in the world, in opposition to the 
Church, which claims to be the power of a future 
Divine life. This antagonism between Church and 
State was never indeed overt or pronounced till after 
the Reformation; but it was always latent, because 
the Church in spite of her pedigree always bore the 
State in her flanks, and nursed it to maturity; and 
the child is bound to inherit of the parent, or thrive 
by the latter's decline and decease. It is only now 
in our own day accordingly when they both feel the 
hand of doom upon them, and are reluctantly pre- 
paring to be swallowed up in the long-promised reign 
of God's justice upon earth, that they abandon them- 
selves to unlovely but well-merited mutual recrimi- 
nation, and would literally fly — if they were not all 
the while mere shadows devoid of human substance 
— at each other's vicious throat. But the ideal of 
the State however faithless the State itself has been 
to it, is to make men good citizens, or reproduce 
upon an enduring basis their lost paradise; while 
that of the church, however little she herself has 
practically exemplified the influence of her ideal, has 
always been to make men saints, or show them para- 



402 IT IS A MERE STEWARD 

dise well lost for heaven. And there can be no doubt 
as to which of these ideals is most likely in the long 
run to captivate men's imagination, especially as the 
church's practice has always supplied so exquisitely 
inverse a commentary upon its preaching. 

Understand then : civilization all unconsciously to 
itself yet aims at the practical secularization of mans 
religious conscience, or his hope towards God. But its 
method is hopelessly infirm and imbecile because it 
has, to begin with, no adequate conception of human 
nature and human destiny. It is in truth a mere 
steward of humanity, and has never had the least 
pretension to be taken into its counsels or to direct 
its fortunes. Thus it assumes without misgiving that 
man is by nature or creation a moral and rational 
force, not at all perceiving that it thereby denies him 
all generic or race quality. If man be an essentially 
moral and rational existence, that is to say, a subject 
primarily of truth in his understanding, then it is 
plainly impossible that he should ever attain to uni- 
versal form or realize his social destiny: inasmuch 
as that is to be led primarily by good in his heart, 
and only derivatively by truth in his understanding. 
And to make a universal consciousness impossible on 
man's part, is really to deny the creative infinitude 
and heap practical contempt upon it. The truth is 
we are moral and rational only because we have not 



OF MAN'S SPIKITUAL DESTINY. 403 

yet intellectually realized our nature or spiritual crea- 
tion, but stupidly insist on the contrary upon iden- 
tifying it with our vulgar and pragmatical selves. 
Undoubtedly we are the creation of infinite love and 
wisdom, but we are this only in our generic or uni- 
versal, and not the least in our specific or private, 
capacity. But there is just as little doubt that to 
be the creature of infinitude is existentially to be a 
finite form of will and understanding ; because with- 
out such limitation the infinite substance could have 
no fulcrum or point cFappui in the created conscious- 
ness whereby to operate its universal results. Never- 
theless we are not authorized to confound what is 
strictly existential to a thing with what is properly 
essential to it. And yet this is what civilization 
habitually does. For what is properly essential to 
man is his nature as a creature of infinitude, since 
without it he could not as a race, or absolutely, be: 
and what is strictly existential to him is his private 
selfhood or conscious distinction from all other exist- 
ence, since without this he could not contingently 
exist or appear. Now civilization confounds this 
merely personal or existential element in human ex- 
perience with its natural or essential element; and 
consequently makes our nature, which in its last 
analysis is Divine and immaculate, the stalking-horse 
of all our immeasurable personal folly and corruption. 



404 IT UTTERLY MISAPPREHENDS 

Starting with this monstrously inadequate concep- 
tion of what man is by nature or creation, the method 
which civilization employs to effect its own compara- 
tively low ends, or make men good citizens, cannot 
help proving signally inefficient. For regarding man 
as an essentially rational and moral force, whose heart 
is firmly bound to the allegiance of his head, and 
whose normal activity consequently is voluntary not 
spontaneous, calculated not free, it seeks to accomplish 
its ends with men by an appeal to their prudence 
mainly : that is, through the pressure of an instituted 
order and decency, or one which is guaranteed in 
the last resort not by the inward consent of the 
subject, but by the outward force of the community. 
In other words, it utterly excludes from its horizon 
any social or distinctively ratce-destiny for man, and 
would doubtless freely commute that heavenly birth- 
right any day for whatever steaming and savory 
mess of pottage might be complacently proffered us 
by political economy. Thus civilization is organized 
upon the truth of an absolute or unconditioned self- 
hood in man, instead of a rigidly phenomenal or 
provisional one ; and hence it regards him not as a 
typical or shadowy and unsubstantial person, literally 
masking an infinite reality, but as a strictly real or 
secular and finite thing, rightly and rigidly amenable 
to all other things for the good and evil consequences 



ITS PROVIDENTIAL FUNCTION. 405 

which inhere in his actions. I am sure then that 
you, good friend, will justify the indictment I bring 
against our existing order — the merely instituted 
decency, the merely legal justice or righteousness 
under which we have been sheltered all these cen- 
turies — w r hen I say that it stays itself mainly upon 
self-love and worldly prudence in its votary as his 
ruling principles of action, and hence not only specu- 
latively ignores his spiritual nature or social destiny, 
but systematically obstructs and resists its providen- 
tial evolution, by practically authenticating all the 
baser, and outlawing all the more generous, attributes 
of humanity. 

The mistake has been unavoidable. Men do not 
know their own nature as determined primarily by 
their creator, that is, as pre-eminently spiritual or 
social; but only as determined by themselves, that 
is, as pre-eminently personal or selfish ; and hence 
they lend themselves without scruple to the enforced 
conventional order of human life represented by priest 
and king, and embodied in the institutions of Church 
and State. And the reason why we thus inevitably 
conceive our nature to be determined by ourselves 
and not by our creator is, that creation itself, spirit- 
ually viewed, means the actual transfiguration of the 
created nature by the plenary creative perfection, 
neither more nor less; and hence can only report 



406 THE SPIRITUAL FORM OF OUR 

itself intelligibly or credibly to the creature in so far 
as he feels within himself a life or spirit truly Divine : 
and notoriously we as a general thing have been 
utterly void of such life or spirit. The nearest ap- 
proach we have ever made to it has been purely 
formal and picturesque, consisting in the unaffected 
reverence we have hitherto paid — a reverence which 
at this day, and especially in this land, has become 
purely wilful and superstitious — to certain traditional 
institutions, such as the altar and the throne, under 
which the creative energy has always masked or 
accommodated itself to our carnal and stupid recog- 
nition. And now that a bumptious but providential 
and inexorable science is fast robbing these hoary 
institutions of their absolute sanctity, and reducing 
them to a relative or representative worth at most, 
all those of us who are intellectually honest will be 
obliged, henceforth, either to accept creation exclu- 
sively as a living or spiritual truth falling primarily 
within the compass of our generic or race conscious- 
ness, and only derivatively thence within that of the 
private consciousness : or else to reject it altogether. 

The spiritual form of nature or creation — its form 
as determined by God, is constituted by what we call 
society ; meaning by that word not any merely em- 
pirical or tentative order of human life, such as we 
are now groaning and stifling under, but the essential 



NATURE OR CREATION IS SOCIAL. 407 

brotherhood, fellowship, equality of each man with all 
men, and all men with each, in God. For inasmuch 
as by the exigency of His perfect love God is essen- 
tially creative, or finds His proper life only in com- 
municating Himself to what is not Himself, to what- 
soever in fact is in se most opposite and repugnant 
to Himself, the nature of His creature in order to 
reflect such love must be supremely social; since 
society alone enables us naturally to love others as 
we love ourselves, and even more than we love our- 
selves. If God's love be essentially creative as freely 
endowing others created from itself with its own life 
or being, then it must also be essentially social — as 
finding all its own felicity in the creature's receptivity 
to its advances. And if the absolute life or being 
we have in our creator be social, then it follows that 
the mere contingent or incidental existence we have 
in ourselves, however egregiously unsocial it may for 
a time appear, is necessarily tributary to that being, 
and must infallibly tend in the long run to avouch 
and reproduce it. 

But obviously this social or regenerate tendency 
in our nature cannot be fully constituted, cannot be 
livingly or spiritually realized by us, save in so far 
as we shall have practically renounced — save in so 
far as we shall have cordially lived down, so to speak 
— our selfish or gregarious instincts. This renun- 



408 B UT WE ARE BORN DESPERATELY 

ciation accordingly has been the one great lesson of 
God's providence to us in all the dreary past. To 
this end alone prophets have taught, priests minis- 
tered, and magistrates borne rule. We have been 
extremely slow to learn no doubt, yet millions of men 
see to-day what but a handful saw a century ago, 
namely : that civilization has had no other providen- 
tial mission than gradually to socialize the human 
consciousness, by thoroughly demonstrating the vanity 
of all human pretension, the vice that is latent in all 
our virtue, the selfseeking that underlies and arms our 
fiercest piety, the love of dominion that animates our 
loving-kindness even, and turns it often to cruel tyr- 
anny. In fact our historic past has apparently existed 
for no higher providential end than to make manifest 
the evil which is latent in the finite selfhood, and so 
prepare a permanent foundation in experience for 
human society. The evil thus latent is commensurate 
in quantity and quality with the infinite Divine good- 
ness : because it is really that in substance, though 
formally perverted by a finite recipiency; and no 
diviner mercy could befall us consequently than to 
allow it to be played out betimes in all its hideous 
malignity. Every thoughtful parent knows the philo- 
sophic value of this principle of the manifestation of 
evil in the education of his children. For every child 
upon earth is liable to inherit evil dispositions with 



UNSOCIAL OK SELFISH. 409 

his blood ; and nothing could be more impoverishing 
and indeed fatal to his manhood, in so far as his 
manhood is contingent . upon a true self-knowledge, 
than that these dispositions should be violently sup- 
pressed by parental rigor, instead of being allowed 
to manifest themselves in the gristle, and so become 
tenderly corrected. 

This letter outrages all bounds, I know, my friend, 
but I must make it still more tedious by a word of 
additional appeal to you. I want you definitely to 
understand, then, as the upshot substantially of all 
I have said, that selfhood or personal consciousness, 
though it is doubtless perfectly implied in our spiritual 
creation as stem is implied in rose, is yet not our 
creation any more than stem is rose — any more even 
than the base earth out of which the stem itself grows, 
is the stem. It has always been our supreme infatu- 
ation to regard it in that deceptive light; to look 
upon it as an all-sufficient explication of creation, and 
not as a mere abject implication of it. By thus sys- 
tematically identifying our spiritual creation with our 
preposterous and idiotic selves, the personal preten- 
sion within us becomes so inflamed and inflated out 
of its normal provisional dimensions, as to insist upon 
being no longer base but superstructure to our nature, 
and to require accordingly the most deadly machinery 
of morality to keep us each from turning out a na- 



410 THE PERSONAL ILLUSION 

grant nuisance to every other. We have been taught 
from time immemorial by our pastors and governors, 
that we are each of us a direct creature of God, a 
valid creation in our own personal or private right, 
and not by virtue exclusively of our natural solidarity 
with our kind. And this illusion breeds such un- 
wholesome mists of vanity in our breasts, and such 
dense clouds of error in our understanding, that the 
heat of God's love and the light of His truth have at 
last lost all power to penetrate our indurated moral- 
hides ; and the entire spiritual world consequently — 
the world of our true being, of what ought to be our 
undefiled and unshackled commerce with God and 
man — necessarily takes on a divided aspect, or re- 
solves itself as it were in spite of the creative unity, 
and by a sheer instinct of self-preservation, into two 
hemispheres of good and evil respectively, or heaven 
and hell : the former a realm of ever active inward 
association or assimilation between the Divine and 
human natures ; the latter a realm of ever active out- 
ward waste or elimination, by which all things per- 
manently incommensurate with the created form, 
because alien to the creative substance, may be grad- 
ually brought to the surface of consciousness, and 
so definitively sloughed off. And I for my part am 
perfectly persuaded that if the stupendous illusion 
of moral responsibility, or a private selfhood in man 



SOLE BOOT OF HELL IN" US. 4^1 

adequate to the highest wants of his nature, had not 
been thus utilized spiritually, by being made the base 
of a quasi Divine life in the earth, or a provisional 
kingdom of God in human affairs, which might at 
least corres-pondentially reflect and inaugurate the true 
and permanent things of creative order, our minds 
could never have become — as they have now be- 
come — enlarged and disciplined to the discernment 
of spiritual truth. 

The moralist then, as it seems to me, is very fairly 
answered. His error consists in maintaining the 
absoluteness of our moral judgments, and this error 
I think I have sufficiently demonstrated by showing 
that our moral experience, in place of being abso- 
lute, has been rigidly subservient in the miraculous 
wisdom of God to a superior providential end : 
which is, first, the manifestation through the church 
of living or spiritual evil, the evil of confirmed self- 
hood or self-righteousness, in men's natural person- 
ality ; and then through that again, the definite 
rescue of our race-consciousness from the dominion 
of such evil, in its own reduction to social form 
and order. Let us then leave the moralist, and 
hasten with what speed we may to consider the 
opposition of the churchman : so bringing oar some- 
what protracted labor to its natural close. 



LETTER XXVI. 




Y DEAR FRIEND : It is the idea of the 
moralist, as we saw in our last letter, that 
civilization is an absolute end of God's 
earthly providence. But I have endeav- 
ored to show you that it is a wholly mediate and 
subordinate end, being strictly contingent for its own 
development upon the manifestation of the Divine 
good-will to universal man, or, what is the same 
thing, the revelation of the Divine infinitude or 
omnipotence in our nature, and bound therefore to 
disappear whenever the necessary machinery of such 
manifestation allows the Divine omnipotence to be- 
come visibly or actively efficient in human affairs. 

The misconception of the churchman with respect 
to God's heavenly counsels is strikingly analogous in 
point of form to this of the moralist with respect to 
His earthly counsels ; but it is vastly more serious 
and alarming in point of substance, since a mistake 
in earthly things is of comparatively no moment 



MORALIST AND CHURCHMAN DEFINED. 413 

beside a mistake in heavenly or Divine things. The 
churchman conceives that the Divine love for man 
is fitly or perfectly expressed in the regeneration of 
individuals : and this although it is evident that every 
case of individual regeneration is effected at the cost 
of a proportionate ^generation and degradation to 
other individuals. 

The moralist, stupid soul that he is ! foolishly as- 
sumes that because he himself is inwardly content 
with our existing order, although that order be stayed 
upon any amount of force, or necessarily involve in 
itself a huge infernal enginery of bayonets, prisons, 
dungeons, and scaffolds to give it permanence, there- 
fore God most high must be inwardly content with it 
also. 

In like manner precisely the churchman — because 
his own social sympathy, or sense of fellowship with 
his kind, is so shallow as not to be scandalized by 
the thought of himself being declared righteous and 
blessed, while other men exactly as good as he by 
nature, and very much better perhaps than he by 
actual culture, are remorselessly cast out of the 
Divine favor — just as foolishly assumes, self-right- 
eous soul that he at heart is ! that a state of things 
so flagrantly irrational and inequitable cannot be 
otherwise than eternally grateful to the pure heart 
of God also. 



414 THE ROOT-ERROR IN BOTH THE SAME, 

It is plain then that the error of both these men 
has one and the same root : the infatuation of pro- 
jprium or selfhood ; only with the moralist the infatu- 
ation is venial, as being addressed to the selfhood 
naturally regarded ; while with the churchman it is ' 
fatal, as having reference to the selfhood spiritually 
regarded. Both men have an insane belief that one 
man has a capacity to be better in himself than an- 
other; but this belief is much more insane in one 
than the other, as the moralist thinks such capacity 
due to the man's nature merely, while the church- 
man thinks it due in every case to the man's spiritual 
culture or regeneration, that is at bottom, to the man 
himself: and this latter persuasion is far more in- 
veterate than the former. Thus the men are alike 
blind, only one superficially, the other substantially, 
so ; the moralist being outwardly blind, blind to the 
light of natural fact, and the churchman inwardly or 
spiritually blind, blind to the light of Divine truth. 
You see then that the outlook of the moralist, who is 
this world's worldling, is not half so gloomy spirit- 
ually as that of the churchman, who is the worldling 
of another and a better world, as it is called: for 
the former is simply unintelligent or errs by defect, 
while the latter's lack of intelligence is handicapped 
by a wholly fatuous or misleading light, which is that 
of self-righteousness. 




BUT MORE CURABLE IN THE FORMER. 415 

There seems accordingly but little hope for the 
churchman. The moralist may be safely left for 
correction to the course of events, which seems to 
be fast ushering in a more stable order than that 
he is wont to delight in. For the moralist's judg- 
ment follows the guidance of sense exclusively, and 
when sense itself attests the spiritual truth of things 
he will no longer be victimized by error. But the 
churchman has not this agreeable prospect before 
him. His inivard light has itself become darkness, 
and when that is the case the darkness is utter and 
absolute : for it is no longer the subject eye that is 
in fault (as with the moralist), but the objective light 
itself, which alone empowers any eye to see, has under- 
gone eclipse. The churchman as such * accordingly 
is without a future, his lot being to decrease as the 
substance he has always spiritually symbolized or 
stood for increases : this substance being the Lord, 
of Divine Natural man, that is, Society. 

* Eor I hope no reader of these letters will deem me so presump- 
tuous as to think of pronouncing judgment upon the future of concrete 
flesh-and-blood men — whether they be churchmen or statesmen — for 
I venture to say that these in common with us much happier nameless 
men will have a greatly better personal fortune at the Divine hands 
than any of them ecclesiastically or politically deserve, whether that 
fortune consign them to heaven or hell. It is only the abstract church- 
man and statesman (as alone representatively existing to the Divine 
mind) whom my strictures have to do with, and by no means any lit- 
eral person so named. 



416 IT IS MORE SUPERFICIAL IN THE ONE, 

Doubtless the reason why the evil which the 
churchman formally embodies, or with which he is 
representatively identified, is so much more hopeless 
than that which the moralist propagates and perpetu- 
ates, is, as I have perhaps already said, that it is 
spiritual or central, involving the heart, while the 
other is merely natural or circumferential, involving 
the senses. False witness, fraud, adultery, murder, 
and covetousness are natural to man, that is, are 
inevitable to his nature as a creature of infinitude 
so long as he is intellectually unaware of the spirit- 
ual or inward and impersonal quality of such in- 
finitude, and instinctively seeks to realize it in this 
absurd personal way : as if the bonds of his person- 
ality (which are so useful and necessary in giving 
him fixity or standing-ground to his own conscious- 
ness) had only to be thrown off, and not reverently 
taken up into his own spiritual substance, in order 
to achieve the freedom he thus instinctively or hu- 
manly craves. It always seems to flesh and blood 
that freedom is one with emancipation from law, and 
it is nothing but this false persuasion that makes all 
our clandestine ways appear so sweet to the ordinary 
flesh-and-blood mind. The moment a thing is for- 
bidden to that mind, however indifferent to it the 
man may have been the moment before, he becomes 
eager to do it. The reason is that he mistakes the 



AND MORE SUBSTANTIAL IN THE OTHER. 417 

purpose of law, which is by no means to suppress 
our outward freedom, but by moderating its wan- 
ton and suicidal extravagance, or guarding it from 
license, to educate us to inward, spiritual, or Di- 
vine freedom. The flesh-and -blood mind is not the 
true or distinctively human mind, but merely the 
mind of the animal in us. And the animal mind is 
bound of its own nature to be servile to the human 
mind, and realize its only chance of freedom by 
acquiescing in such servitude. Of course the man 
himself has got to be de-animalized, that is, to 
become spiritual and human before the animal in 
him can be placated or subdued. The State prison 
convict no doubt finds it very hard to imagine while 
he is in prison that his nature entitles him to any 
truer freedom than that which the opening of the 
prison doors would give him. But this is only be- 
cause his misconduct in depriving himself of outward 
freedom has enhanced and inflamed the animal con- 
sciousness in him, and thereby deadened him for the 
time to all inward and higher manifestations of 
freedom. When one is incarcerated by Ms own mis- 
deeds I defy him to entertain anything but a most 
unmanly conception of freedom, being sure to make 
it outward solely, or to lie in the power of doing 
evil with impunity. If his folly had left him free 
to conceive of it in its human aspect, as the power 



418 ALL MANNER OF SIN FORGIVEN TO MEN 

of doing good, and good alone, at the instance of 
one's heart, he would be instantly reconciled to 
his fetters, nay, would pray for additional bolts and 
stronger bars. 

But this natural ignorance of man, profound as it 
unquestionably is, is altogether excusable and tran- 
sient, and by no means leaves him without hope; 
for any possible subsequent Divine enlargement of 
his nature will be sure to enlarge and improve his 
moral temper. Thus we may say that the slanderer, 
the swindler, the adulterer, the murderer, the covetous 
man universally in short, whatever be his spiritual 
ignorance or superstition, never finds it excluding 
him from immortal life, if indeed he himself have 
happily any aspiration towards such a thing. For, as 
Christ taught, "all manner of sin and blasphemy shall 
be forgiven unto men, except the sin or blasphemy 
against the holy spirit, which has no forgiveness either 
in this world or that to/rich is to come." That is to 
say: our moral evils are natural, and spring from 
the circumstance that our nature is not yet Divinely 
redeemed or recovered from the influence of man's 
finite personality and reduced to permanent order; 
hence they have only an actual force and will alto- 
gether disappear when human nature comes to spir- 
itual or social out of material or selfish form. But 
self-righteousness is an inward or spiritual condition 



BUT THAT AGAINST THE HOLY GHOST. 419 

of the subject laying hold upon a man not through 
his body, or what relates him to the outward world, 
but through his soul, or what relates him to God : 
so vitiating or falsifying him at the very core of his 
being. For a man's being is spiritually determined 
solely by the idea he entertains at heart of God as 
a being of really infinite goodness, towards whom 
his only logical or proper attitude therefore is one of 
prostrate adoration or humility. Now it is evident 
that no man who is at all satisfied with himself — 
much less a man whose self-satisfaction is motived 
upon a persuasion of his own exceptional private 
regeneration — is capable of feeling adoration towards 
the infinite goodness : or, to say the same thing in 
other words, is capable of a humble or deprecatory 
judgment in relation to himself. How shall a man 
dare to think meanly of himself when he looks upon 
that self as a piece of exquisite Divine or regener- 
ative workmanship ? This would be to think meanly 
of God, so that even the churchman's piety is a snare 
to him and constrains him to self-delusion. In fact 
the devil arms his hooks nowadays with no subtler 
or more specious bait than that of piety, and people 
who are so unfortunate as to have it in their blood, 
inheriting a more or less devout temperament from 
their ancestors, cannot be too thankful to the frosty 
providence that so often kindly nips in the bud their 



420 SELF-RIGHTEOUSNESS THE OUTGROWTH OF A 

nascent aspirations after personal holiness, and so if 
need be compels them personally into the safer spir- 
itual paths of a frank and utter worlclliness. 

Certainly then self-righteousness — which is a sat- 
isfactory estimate of one's own selfhood, character, 
or standing as compared with that of the vast ma- 
jority of men, those embraced in the "world" for 
example — is spiritually the only fatal form of un- 
godliness. And just as certainly it is a plant requir- 
ing for its development a church-soil ; so that if the 
church had never existed as an integral or repre- 
sentative factor in the development of human nature, 
we should have been at a loss to imagine any soil 
rank enough or tropical enough to produce it; and 
men accordingly would have been left to the much 
less harmful dominion and devices of their merely 
selfish and w r orldly loves. This at any rate is my 
own thorough intellectual conviction, and I am bound 
to show you the grounds of it. 

Do me the justice however not to imagine that 
I am going to overwhelm you with any scientific 
evidence of the truth of my conviction, such evidence 
as will compel your assent, or deprive you of freedom 
to think differently from me. For such evidence is 
out of place in reference to intellectual things or 
truths of perception. My conviction, for example, 
in relation to the intimate connection between a self- 



CHURCH-SOIL IN OUR NATURE. 421 

righteous temper in man and the atmosphere of the 
church institution, is not the fruit of any scientific 
observation or inductive reasoning on my part, though 
these things aptly enough come in to enforce it. 
And a parade therefore of the scientific grounds of 
such a conviction would not only be uncalled for 
or inappropriate, but would prove derogatory to the 
interests of a much larger and Diviner life in man 
than that of science, to which I at all events feel 
my sympathies primarily due : I mean of course our 
distinctively intellectual life, or the life which is 
authenticated by our affections, and not by our senses. 
Neither is the conviction in question the fruit pri- 
marily of any private spiritual regeneration on my 
part, but is such fruit only in a rigidly secondary 
sense, that is, only in so far as my private spiritual 
regeneration is itself the fruit altogether of a Divine 
redemption of our common nature. In short, you 
must all along assiduously remember that we are not 
now talking of any paltry fact of organic experience, 
or fact of sense, which can be scientifically probed 
or proved : proved, that is, to men's senses : but of 
a truth of men's inward or regenerate nature exclu- 
sively, of their living or spiritual experience, of their 
soul-history as it were; a truth which has slowly 
flowered out of the suffering human heart, and which 
therefore appeals for its ratification in every mind 



422 BOTH "THE CHURCH" AND "THE WORLD" 

solely to the man's cultivated or disciplined affections. 
It is a truth which no amount of merely scientific 
culture, nor any ardor of ratiocinative acumen, will 
ever qualify a man to do justice to. In fact these 
things are very apt to ^qualify men for the ac- 
knowledgment of spiritual or living truth, since the 
method of science and that of intellectual cognition 
are directly opposed : the one proceeding from with- 
out inwards, or from sense to soul; the other from 
within outwards, or from soul to sense.* 

But let me at least present some orderly consid- 
erations to you which may throw light upon the 
grounds of my conviction that all our spiritual evil 
— evil of self-righteousness — is intimately connected 
with the outgrowth and development of the church 
in human nature. 

For the "church" is just as much a natural fact, 
or outgrowth of human nature as the "world" is. 
In casting our eyes back to the beginnings of man's 
earthly genesis we find his consciousness almost com- 

* A man shaving himself before a looking-glass always appears, to 
one whose eye is fixed upon the glass, to be shaving himself with his 
left hand. This illustrates the immature judgment of science in making 
sense the supreme arbiter of truth as well as of fact. Of course the 
man's living or intellectual judgment of the truth of the case is sure 
to correct this scientific judgment, inasmuch as, to the intellect or life, 
the sensible form or appearance of things is never in direct but always 
in inverse accord with their spiritual substance or being. 



A MERE GERMINATION OF HUMAN NATURE. 423 



pletely submerged by his senses. The needs of their 
visible subsistence are at first imperative upon men, 
and they know little more than the instincts and the 
arts that relate them to the satisfaction of their bod- 
ily appetites. Some men are endowed with quicker 
senses, with greater physical force and endurance, 
with subtler inventive ingenuity and alertness, than 
others, and these qualities insure their subjects an 
exceptionally successful career. Men of a slower 
nature on the other hand, men of a defective wit 
and sagacity, men of a sluggish individual genius 
with perhaps a greater tendency to sociability or 
companionship than others, constitute a comparatively 
unfortunate or inferior and dependent class. The 
former no doubt in every community are a small 
minority of men, and "keep the world going," as 
we say, for their superior practical or productive en- 
ergy soon throws the government of the community 
into their hands. The latter are a very large ma- 
jority of the human family, and are doomed to gravi- 
tate erelong into the condition of mere proletaries, 
keeping up the fecundity of the race. All which is 
only saying, in other words, that the former constitute 
a select or distinguished class of men, while their 
brethren as a class are totally without distinction. 

Now to the devout imagination : for it is almost 
needless to say, that in face of this great and formi- 



424 "CHURCH" AND "WORLD" A DISTINCTIVELY 

dable reality of a fixed outward world, and before 
the world has betrayed its latent humanity, or sub- 
serviency to Divine uses, all men are helplessly, or 
as we say instinctively, devout, even to the pitch of 
superstition or fetichism : to the devout imagination 
of men, I repeat, there is in this obvious charac- 
teristic division of men into two classes a natural 
basis for the church, or for the acknowledgment of 
a Divinely providential order in the earth. There is 
as yet of course no such thing as the church in name, 
or as a corporate organization fenced in from the 
outlying world of mankind by ritual ceremonies or 
observances ; but it is there practically or in substance 
all the while, inwardly recognizable to every one in 
whom a strong virus of personality, or selfhood, or 
character has had opportunity to assert itself, and 
it only awaits the imposition of its name to be sub- 
missively recognized or acquiesced in by the vulgar 
intelligence as well. For the fundamental idea of 
the church as a corporate or visible institution is 
that of a select or chosen few of mankind Divinely 
culled, or called out, from the undistinguished, cha- 
otic or monotonous mass of men, and set apart to 
the Divine service and honor. And where to the 
eye of our innocent or unsophisticated carnal intel- 
ligence is this idea better embodied than it is in 
those who either by their productive genius and 



NATURAL DEVELOPMENT IN MAN. 425 

energy first make the earth fruitful, and introduce 
the community to the acquaintance of wealth and its 
resources, or else by their manifest military skill and 
prowess teach the community how to defend and pro- 
tect their life and property from the cupidity of in- 
vaders ? These men by their inventive sagacity and 
enterprise, by their heroism, by their administrative 
skill and ability, are for the time a true Divine seed 
in human nature, and mark or constitute the dis- 
tinctively providential movement in humanity. They 
are the astute Abrams, and Isaacs, and Jacobs who 
all unknown to themselves marshal the otherwise 
imbecile masses of men into line with man's Di- 
vine-natural destiny. And they constitute accordingly 
God's true church in the earth so long as the church 
is at all a puissant reality : that is to say, long before 
it has attained to the outward name or conscious- 
ness of being a church, and sunk into the unwhole- 
some and emasculate spiritual dilettantism which 
that unfortunate name or consciousness connotes. 

Here then is my first point made : the church 
and — by virtue of its inclusion in that — the world 
are both alike rigidly natural facts, are both alike 
indubitable historic powers or functions of human na- 
ture, and represent nothing more than the alter- 
nate spiritual and material aspect which human 
history derives from its undoubted natural factors. 



426 "CHURCH" AND "WORLD" NATURAL FACTS. 

And the second point which I intended to establish 
was that our existing self-righteous tendencies, which 
spiritually viewed are the only reprehensible tenden- 
cies of human nature, come from the church, and 
are a wholly proper development or expression of 
her spirit in us. That is to say, my general purpose 
in establishing this point is to show that the sacred 
element in human life, in so far as it has come to the 
surface of consciousness in institutions, or can be in 
any way literally identified, is infinitely less innocent 
than the rival secular element, and does infinitely 
more harm to the spiritual life of man. 

But this proposition, because it involves a 

much more spiritual apprehension of the meaning 
of human nature, and a much closer insight into 
its metaphysical principles, had better be left for its 
working out to another letter. 



LETTER XXVII 




T DEAR FRIEND : We saw in the last 
letter that the church and the world are 
both alike facts of human nature, and ex- 
press nothing but her composite parentage, 
her mixed Divine and human genius. Human nature 
has an equal aspect towards God and man, for it is 
confessedly the nature of a creature, and a creature 
is nothing in itself but the existence or going forth of 
its creator. Thus we may say it has both a Divine 
side by virtue of God alone being a creator, and a 
human side by virtue of this creator being essential 
man. For we must always bear in mind that the 
human side of our nature is not in the least consti- 
tuted by us phenomenal men (by you and me, for 
instance, and others like you and me, who call our- 
selves men) but solely by God the Lord who alone is 
Man both spiritually and naturally. You and I, you 
know, are merely conscious men ; that is, we seem to 
ourselves to be a human reality, but in truth we are 



428 WE DO NOT INHERIT HUMAN NATURE, BUT 

mere shadows of such reality, having no more of 
human substance in ourselves, no more pretension 
either of us actually to be the man we seem, than 
our shadow in a looking-glass has to be our personal 
substance. We are just the same seeming or sem- 
blance in the natural sphere, or sphere of conscious- 
ness, which that phenomenon is in the scientific 
sphere, or sphere of sense, with precisely the same 
claim to objective reality or spiritual being, as it has 
to subjective reality * or moral consciousness, not a 
particle more or less. Besides you know that nature 
is one and universal, while we are nothing if we are 
not many and particular. You know moreover, at 
least I have no doubt you do, I do at all events, that 
though we all the while flatter ourselves that we pos- 
sess this universal substance, and are wont to claim 
human nature as our own, what a struggle it always 
costs us to arrive at the least inward realization of 
it, or universalize ourselves in our affections one jot. 
And then, after all our struggles, we are compelled to 
lay aside our familiar flesh and bones in the grave, 
as if we had been confessedly animals all along and 
not men. Thus I admit that you and I and all other 
men are phenomenal or conscious forms of humanity, 
and give forth or reproduce in our petty persons 
some faint shadow of her stupendous substance. But 
this is a totally distinct thing from saying that we 



ATTAIN TO IT BY REGENERATION. 429 

ourselves constitute humanity, unless indeed we are 
willing to reckon the shadow of a thing identical with 
its substance. For if we are veritable phenomena, 
manifestations, products of human nature, unques- 
tionable deliverances of her miraculous womb, it is 
simply preposterous to suppose that she can feel her 
existence contingent for a moment upon ours, how- 
ever much indeed the consciousness of such existence 
may be confined to us. 

Remember then, my friend, that you and I and all 
the other minim personalities of the universe are so 
far from constituting the human side of our nature 
that we are full surely constituted by it, deriving all 
our power consciously to exist and act from it, and it 
alone. Nor can any of us atomic men, however much 
we may claim to be children of nature, ever boast 
himself of being in any sense her favorite child. She 
makes small account of persons at any time, allowing 
us to be cut down in myriads whenever she feels her- 
self impelled to a fuller manifestation of herself, and 
she drenches us with a perpetual shower of personal 
disasters, which rob us of assured health or fortune 
or of stable domestic felicity in a way to prove even 
to the dullest imagination, that she is at deadly and 
deliberate war with our private welfare save in so far 
as it is a mere reflection of our public worth. The 
undeniable reason of this inveterate hostility on the 



430 OUR NATURAL HISTORY IS 

part of nature to men's private consequence when 
unconditioned upon their public desert, is that being 
human au fond her form is necessarily social, being 
the intense marriage unity of its particular and uni- 
versal interests, or its private and public elements : 
and so long therefore as this natural marriage unity 
lacks its literal or ritual consecration in our outward 
or phenomenal personalities, this social form of hu- 
manity will never come to men's knowledge, and every 
man accordingly must be left to perish in his selfish- 
ness. 

Our natural history in fact is providentially de- 
signed for no other purpose than to exemplify the 
vanity or nothingness of human individuality when 
underived from race or nature, and the gospel it pro- 
claims to every man as the only gospel of immor- 
tality, as at least the only one he can inwardlj/ live 
by, is that of a thoroughly righteous self-contempt, or 
a just disdain of his own interests whenever they 
bring him into collision with those of society or his 
fellow-man. For the only real fellow that the indi- 
vidual man has in nature, is by no means some other 
individual man (for this would be not fellowship or 
equality but identity) but the complex or composite 
man, society. Society is the only real or Divine nat- 
ural man, and we individual men (falsely so-called) 
attain to a real or Divinely recognizable individuality 



A DIVINELY REDEMPTIVE PROCESS. 431 

only in identifying ourselves with him : that is, in 
losing our life in ourselves and finding it again, resur- 
gent, in society. The intellectual meaning with which 
this great fact of experience is fraught is, that what we 
call nature, meaning thereby the outward world, the 
world apprehended by sense, and in spite of its over- 
whelming reality to sense, is at bottom a profound 
Divine imposture or cheat which is most providen- 
tially engineered all the while in the interest of in- 
effable (that is to say, infinite and eternal) spiritual 
realities of which it is the exact counterpart and cor- 
respondence, and which therefore we should always 
remain ignorant of unless we were thus figuratively or 
experimentally taught. These ineffable and (unless 
they be revealed) unthinkable spiritual realities are 
God : as He is called by those who recognize Him 
mainly as he is outwardly revealed to the understand- 
ing under the form of Truth : and Man : as he is 
named by those who recognize Him mainly as he is 
inwardly revealed to the heart under the form of 

s 

Good : but God-man, or the Lord, as He is more 
comprehensively designated by those who recognize 
him as a practical providence in history, that is, as He 
becomes revealed to sense under the form of power, 
or goodness and truth united, in order to effect the 
actual redemption of human nature or the human race 
from death. 



432 HUMAN NATURE IS A UNIVERSAL 

What then finally is nature in herself regarded ? I 
don't mean what is commonly called nature, being 
the external world, which is a mere chaos of mineral, 
vegetable, and animal existence without rhythm or 
law in itself to make it intelligible, for this in truth 
is not nature but merely that necessary background 
or basis of specific existence which nature requires to 
emphasize or set off her own universality. No, I mean 
by nature human nature, the nature of man, for this 
is the only nature that objectively exists to its own 
subjects, and so is capable of giving them elevation 
out of themselves. And if we ask what human na- 
ture, or the nature of man, is, we have a sure index to 
the answer in ascertaining what man himself is : for 
the nature of a thing is merely the development of 
its being to its own consciousness. 

Now man is a purely personal, unreal, or phenome- 
nal subject, existing only to consciousness, not to sense, 
but firmly related to lower or outward things by his 
bodily organization or senses which give him fixity or 
finiteness, and to higher or inward things by his in- 
organic, percipient soul which gives him freedom or 
rational enlargement. And human nature, then, be- 
ing the nature of man, must be the sphere of con- 
sciousness in him, the sphere of his conscious life, out- 
side of which he does not exist. How then does it 
differ from the man himself? If human nature be 



REALM OF CONSCIOUSNESS IN MAN. 433 

the sphere of consciousness in men, and man have no 
existence out of consciousness, what hinders me iden- 
tifying myself with my nature ? This fact alone : that 
I being a person am a finite or particular form of con- 
sciousness, without universal quality, whereas nature 
not being a person is not a finite or particular form of 
consciousness, but a most indefinite or universal one, 
without particular quality. Accordingly nature is to 
be logically defined as the realm of consciousness in 
man, the peculiarly human realm, inasmuch as it sepa- 
rates him from the realm of sense which he shares in 
common with animal and vegetable and mineral. It 
is no thing, nor yet any congeries of things save to 
sense and the judgment begotten of it, but a cer- 
tain undefined or purely potential and promissory 
existence which subjectively never is but is always 
becoming or to be, and on its sensibly objective side 
images or reflects the intercourse of infinite and finite, 
God and man, spirit and flesh, constituting indeed to 
our sensuous imagination the eternal link or liaison 
of the two. Tor as God being creative is infinite in 
himself, that is, spirit or life, and therefore essentially 
inward, and as man being created is finite in himself, 
that is, matter or death, and therefore essentially out- 
ward, there must be spiritually an endless and fatal 
subjective disagreement between the two creative fac- 
tors : so that if some middle term did not exist to 



434 HUMAN NATURE NOT THE SPIRITUAL 

fuse or reconcile these discordant factors in her own 
commanding objectivity, creation would be a failure 
in first principles. Now nature is this actual middle 
term. She offers her effectual mediation to the rival 
or opposite creative factors, and by her strictly un- 
defined or universal objectivity covers up or makes 
amends for their subjective disagreement by allowing 
them to become objectively one or united, within her 
own strict limits mind you, or mutually to change 
places, infinite becoming finite and finite infinite, in a 
new and immortal human individuality. 

Nature accordingly is not creation, nor any part 
of creation (though she is included in it as the crea- 
ture's constitutional or mother-substance), for creation 
is wholly spiritual, living, or subjective, being the 
work of omnipotence, or of God's infinity and eternity, 
and is therefore inscrutable to mortal ken. But though 
nature is not either in whole or in part God's spirit- 
ual creation, she nevertheless most truly reveals or 
accommodates it to our nascent and obstinate in- 
telligence, and is herself frankly unintelligible and 
misleading save as such revelation. We should never 
have been able even to dream of creation as a living 
and spiritual or miraculous work of God, nor of God 
himself consequently as a being infinite and eternal 
in love, wisdom, and power, if nature were a fixed 
physical existence or quantity shut up to the dimen- 



CREATION, BUT REVEALS IT. 435 

sions of space and time. But this is just what she is 
not - — a fixed physical existence, but a wholly unfixed 
or metaphysical one, forever enlarging to men's affec- 
tion and thought as their affection and thought them- 
selves become penetrated and interfused by the Divine 
infinitude, or moulded to the inspiration of the creative 
goodness and truth. It is true that being the abjectly 
helpless and dependent intelligences we are, we are 
indebted for our earliest recognition of nature's pres- 
ence and power to the gross sensible forms of min- 
eral, vegetable, and animal existence, and for a long 
time indeed do not scruple to identify her personality 
with such forms. But it is not long before we begin 
to divine her intensely human quality, and thenceforth 
we come to acknowledge her only as the perfect mar- 
riage fusion or unity of the Divine and human natures. 
Remember then that nature in herself or subjectively 
is neither God nor man, but the rigid neutrality or 
indifference of the two, while on her objective side, or 
viewed from the maternal uses she contributes to the 
spiritual creation, she reflects each to the knowledge 
of the other, and so enables them each to reap the 
transcendent spiritual or subjective fruits of such 
knowledge. Or, to say the same thing in other 
words, remember that nature is neither a spiritual nor 
yet a physical existence, but a most strictly metaphys- 
ical or empirical one, provisionally mediating between 



436 SHE FILLS OUT OUR UNREAL PERSONS 

the two, since while it owes its base or fixed body to 
physics, it owes its superstructure or free expansive 
soul entirely to spirit. 

But although nature is a purely metaphysic realm, 
it will not do to infer that she is therefore without 
cognizable form. Existence is not possible without 
cognizable form, nor even conceivable without think- 
able form, because distinctive form is the essence of a 
thing or what it derives from the creative Esse. It is 
true that nature being metaphysic substance is with- 
out material form in se, form discernible to sense ; 
but the entire realm of personality is hers, and the 
material world exists only to furnish a basis to person- 
ality. Thus though nature herself is not material 
she yet holds the whole realm of physics subject to 
her metaphysic will. Sense in fact is simply con- 
sciousness in solution. And the reason doubtless 
therefore why personality is never discernible to sense 
but only to consciousness, is because sense is included 
in consciousness as the marble in the statue, or what- 
ever mere materies in whatever opus. And surely 
you would not expect the dead matter of a thing to 
be able to judge of the living form to which it is 
subservient. 

It is very much the fashion just now with scientific 
fledglings and unintellectual people generally to decry 
metaphysics, or sneer at them in fact, as though meta- 



WITH VALID HUMAN SUBSTANCE. 437 

physical existence were confessedly no existence, or as 
if all existence were bound to be real or impersonal, 
and confess itself in the last analysis a thing. I don't 
mean to profess any contempt for things, for at times 
I feel a very considerable relish for them, and derive 
much comfort from them. But at the same time I 
should be wretched to think all existence confined 
to them. My affections are very apt to go out to- 
wards persons, and if I could be persuaded therefore 
that persons had no souls, but only bodies, my proper 
human life would be very much diminished. Instead 
of being as I had thought it a house of three stories 
at the very least, I should find it reduced to a house of 
one story, and that a squalid basement sunk in earth. 
These persons to be sure are but finite forms, im- 
perfect images, of goodness and truth. But in conse- 
quence of that very fact they exert a most benignant 
power or influence upon my life : for I cannot know 
goodness and truth in themselves, but only as they 
approximate themselves to my feeble understanding 
in finite types. I am much impressed also with the 
beauty of certain persons, with their artistic genius or 
their executive talent and skill, and if the persons 
did not exist who betrayed these attractive qualities 
to me, I should feel myself sadly mystified or trifled 
with. But if these persons exist at all, they exist 
one and all only metaphysically. That is to say, their 



438 SHE IS THE LIFE OF LAW OR ORDER 

existence — while it acknowledges a physical basis, 
imperatively claims at the same time a free or spiritual 
superstructure. And it is only a priggish or pedantic 
person who is liable to the gross mistake alike in 
science as in art of making base dominate superstruc- 
ture, or body govern soul. 

Now by what signs is metaphysical existence char- 
acterized that it shall not be swamped in physics? 
In other words, how do we recognize the natural 
force in things, and recognize it so infallibly as to 
be in no danger of ever confounding it in thought 
with their material force ? I think this question 
admits of a satisfactory answer. 

The natural force in things then signalizes itself 
by this infallible earmark, namely : it is a force of 
law or order, constraining our allegiance under pain 
of death. This is the invariable distinction of natu- 
ral law : its strictly negative or death-bearing quality 
towards its finite subject. It has on its face no posi- 
tive or life-bearing quality whatever for its subject, 
absolutely none, but remorselessly shuts him up to 
despair and death in himself, as if to warn him past 
all possibility of mistake that nature disowns a finite 
subjectivity, and will never therefore under any cir- 
cumstances justify his private pretension to be her 
proper offspring. It chases the subject out of every 
hidden nook and corner of his personal conscious- 



IN ALL LOWER EXISTENCES. 439 

ness, and makes even his most innocent and transient 
animal delights perilous to his freedom, or danger- 
ous to his soul's peace. Thus when I eat and drink 
and sleep, or enact any other automatic function pre- 
scribed by my animal organization, I am constrained 
to be very prudent lest I suddenly find myself in 
undesigned conflict with my nature ; and this is the 
only way that I gradually come to natural conscious- 
ness, or learn to separate myself from the animal 
chained up in my body. For I never eat and drink 
and sleep, you will observe, at the instance of my 
proper nature, which is exclusively human, and there- 
fore Divine and infinite, or free from all want, but 
at the prompting of those gross animal, vegetable, 
and mineral wants or appetites which are necessarily 
bound up or involved in my nature by way of afford- 
ing it a ground of evolution to the consciousness of 
its subject. For human nature has no outward or 
objective evolution, that is, no evolution in itself, 
but only to its conscious subject, and as the true or 
metaphysic form of such subjectivity. Thus it has no 
existence to sense, but only to consciousness. And 
no man who does n't come to his consciousness of it 
in the purely inward or metaphysic way I have de- 
scribed, that is, only in a way of hearty resistance to 
his tyrannous animal appetites and tendencies, has any 
consciousness of it at all, but remains at his very 



440 SHE IS' INWARDLY INSTINCT WITH LOVE 

best a mere conscious animal in human form. Ac- 
cordingly let me eat or drink to excess, and sleep 
without regard to time and place, or perform any- 
other of my automatic or animal functions with a full 
animal absorption in it, that is, without a primary 
respect to the superior human convenances which 
qualify such functions to men, and I am instantly 
sure to hear an inward Divine voice arraigning me 
as a culprit to my own nature, and compelling me 
perhaps to walk humbly many days afterwards.* 

* Sic itur ad astra : there is no way of getting to heaven but the way 
of s^-denial, which is inward or spiritual humility. There are but few 
who are content to walk in this heavenly way, I know, because it is not 
half so sweet and alluring to carnal thought as the way of self-indulgence, 
which is that of saintly asceticism. There is nothing so inwardly nour- 
ishing to SELF-hood in man as the culture of asceticism, or the practice 
of needlessly snubbing one's innocent and unconscious flesh : for of 
course the more that is done of this unrequired or gratuitous work, the 
more the subject's complacency in himself abounds, and the greater 
grows his sense of merit, which is the source of all our spiritual defile- 
ment. Our nature never prompts any mortification to the flesh in us : 
for the flesh is always Divinely sweet and modest until it has been be- 
devilled by our ascetic efforts to worry some comfort out of it to our 
»<?^-righteous pretensions : but only to the fleshly mind, which is the exact 
mind of the ascetic or church-saint. If accordingly you want to see how 
exquisitely filthy a man may inwardly be who is outwardly expert and 
cultivated in the spirit and methods of ascetic piety, you have only to 
look up some of Swedenborg's Memorable Relations, describing certain 
of the Romish saints as they appear in their spiritual undress, when 
stripped of their decent and honorable natural clothing, and if I mistake 
not you will find yourself agreeably edified. To judge from Sweden- 



AKD THEREFORE "LOATHES ASCETICISM. 441 

Such is human nature, and its adverse bearing 
upon men's animal or finite and outward person- 
alities. But this inauspicious bearing of it seems 
very much heightened when it assumes moral form, 
and is seen no longer simply controlling the relations 
that bind a man to his own body, or to the animal 
force in his own body, but much more the inward or 
metaphysic relations of man to man. For now its 
death -bearing animus becomes vividly enhanced in 
its stamping men no longer vicious merely, with the 
hospital and lunatic asylum in prospect, but criminal 
as well, with the jail and the scaffold in the distance 
to emphasize or give force to the verdict. It now 
practically says in fact that men are not only corrupt 

borg's remarkable daguerreotypes (for they have all the softness of the 
daguerreotype, betraying the warmth of love in their production, no less 
than the light of intelligence) I should say that this class of persons, 
the church-saint, of all our spiritual mauvais sujets, displays the most 
inveterately subterranean proclivities or shows men's evil possibilities at 
their ne plus ultra of development, their utmost refinement of natural 
degeneracy. I say this of course not because the saints in question 
happen to be Romish (though the Romish church unquestionably deals 
with a lower order of heart and mind than the Protestant does, and is 
very apt to breed therefore much more coarse and brutal conceptions of 
sanctity when it breeds any), but simply because the aspiration after 
personal holiness, whether in Protestant or Catholic, is the most de- 
praved spiritual tendency of the human heart, and is utterly fatal there- 
fore to God's love in the human soul. For the infallible law of spirit- 
ual life is that he icho exalts himself shall be abased, and he who abases 
himself (not hisfesh, mind you !) shall be exalted. 



442 BUT OKLY AS A MORAL FORCE SHE SHOWS 

or worthless on their passive physical side, which is 
the mother's side in them, but also and much more 
on their active, voluntary, or moral side, which they 
inherit from the father. Thus my nature finally 
reveals itself in its moral form of evolution not merely 
as the organ of my instincts, but as the true and 
sole organic power behind my will or personality : so 
assailing my moral or self-righteous power, my pride 
of freedom or selfhood, in the most secret fastnesses 
of its strength, and asserting its death -bearing energy 
over my human person with new emphasis in making 
my fellow-man henceforth the register and vindicator 
of its decrees, in addition to or in place of my own 
less faithful private conscience. 

I have now at length, I hope, succeeded in making 
two points of first-rate philosophic moment perfectly 
clear to you. 1. We have seen what human nature 
is in itself, namely : a middle-ground, or transition- 
point, between creator and creature, God and man, 
infinite and finite, spirit and flesh, making the two 
freely interchangeable. 2. We have seen also by 
what infallible tokens it reveals itself in men's finite 
or private consciousness, namely : as a free or regen- 
erative spiritual force in them aiming to give them 
life out of death by releasing them from their finite 
limitations, or the bondage of their animal, vegetable, 
and mineral ties (which merely give men visible con- 



HER TRUE LNJUNITUNG TENDEKXESS. 443 

stitution or make theni phenomenal to themselves), so 
allying them at last in conscious fellowship with 
God's spiritual infinitude. 

But a third point remains to be considered, not 
perhaps of equal speculative importance with these, 
but of even greater practical consequence, and that is, 
briefly stated : What is the machinery by which our 
Divinized human nature vindicates itself, or avouches 
its existence, to the public conscience of mankind, so 
inaugurating the reign of God's justice or righteous- 
ness upon earth ? 

— The answer to this question, however, will re- 
quire a letter to itself, but I hope this letter will be a 
final one, and gather up all that yet remains to be 
understood between us. 




LETTER XXVIII. 

'HttjHfT DEAR FRIEND: — In my last letter I 
. answered, or tried to answer, two ques- 
tions each of sovereign import to the 
speculative welfare of philosophy. The 
first question was about human nature itself, its ori- 
gin and quality. The second led us to consider its 
method of actual development to the consciousness 
of its carnal votary, as conscience, or the negative 
law of human freedom. If you will allow me now 
briefly to resume or recapitulate the answers I gave 
to these questions, bearing as they do so profoundly 
on the speculative interests of religion and philosophy, 
we shall both of us be better able to do justice to 
a third question which we are more particularly 
bound to consider in the present letter, and which 
is of transcendent practical importance to the inter- 
ests, not of any special science perhaps, but certainly 
to the general science of human life. 

We saw then in our last letter that human nature 



HUMAN NATURE METAPHYSICAL. 445 

is a strictly metaphysic existence, postulating the 
entire realm of physics beneath it or under it pre- 
cisely as the pedestal is postulated in the statue, or 
the body in the soul: in order adequately to base 
it, that is, to finite it, or give it on its objective side 
permanent fixity or isolation. Human nature origi- 
nates spiritually in God who is real or essential man, 
and it merely expresses on its inward or spiritual 
side the ceaseless effort of His providence to manifest 
itself creatively, that is, to attain to adequate actual 
or existential form in His creature. The creature 
of course ex vi termini is in himself, or qua creature, 
utterly " without form, and void " of distinctive qual- 
ity, and any form or quality he may exhibit therefore 
is not attributable to himself but to the creator in 
him : unless indeed it be a purely evil and fallacious 
form or quality, in which case it exists only to con- 
sciousness, and has no fibre of reality outside of it. 

But although God is in truth most real or es- 
sential man it will not do to infer that He is, ipso 
facto merely, formal or existential man as well. Of 
course He who alone is real or essential man is ipso 
facto also virtually formal or existential man, since 
there can be no such thing as an absolute divorce 
between substance and form: but only virtually, or 
in potency, not actually. His becoming actually 
what He is potentially, or outwardly what He is in- 



446 GOD ALONE IS MAN EITHER 

wardly, depends entirely upon His being creative 
and thus having a sphere of actual or outward mani- 
festation put within His grasp. For the creator who 
is real or inward and essential man becomes actual 
or outward and existential man only through His 
creature, or by virtue of His first giving spiritual 
or inward being to the creature. The creature no 
doubt, unapprised as yet save by revelation of his 
being spiritually created, or of his having any inward 
potency of life, seems to himself to be a most verid- 
ical actual man. But this is all a seeming. For 
he being created is of necessity in himself a mere 
finite form or image of humanity; and even as 
such form or image can only reproduce the human 
type in so far as he is freely united to his brethren : 
which he can never be, which in fact he selfishly 
loathes to be, until his proper interest tardily con- 
strains him to that mercenary policy. Besides, as 
I have already intimated, it is illogical and stupid 
to suppose that any one can be actual or formal 
man but He who is first real or substantial man. 
For if substance and form differed in themselves, 
and not simply in relation to a finite intelligence, 
creation would be at a nonplus. In truth then God 
alone is both real, or inward and essential man, and 
actual, or outward and existential man. In short, He 
alone is man in substance, and man in form. 



m SUBSTANCE OR IN FORM. 447 

Be it understood then between us that we our- 
selves, however truly we may be said to symbolize 
actual human nature, or typify formal manhood, have 
yet no shadow of a claim to constitute such man- 
hood, any more than we have a shadow of claim to 
constitute Divinity, or real and essential manhood. 
For we are only at our best finite phenomenal men, 
and neither singly nor in mass therefore can we ever 
hope to be that actual and unitary form of man, 
which as being correlative to its real or essential 
Divine substance, must be every way proportionate 
to such substance, and therefore itself Divine and 
infinite. But though we have no shadow of justifi- 
cation in so doing, we do nevertheless all the while 
betray our spiritual ignorance in assuming bona fide 
to constitute the whole of the formal and actual hu- 
manity which exists on earth, and which in theory 
reflects the inward and essential humanity of God : 
thus and thereby baffling or indefinitely retarding 
the Divine purpose (and indeed the Divine ability) 
eventually to show us the spiritual truth of the case. 
For God is too wise and good a being (since He is 
real or essential man) practically to contemn or over- 
ride His creature's natural prejudices, and very much 
prefers to make His creature also, like Himself, wise 
and good by gradually illumining those natural preju- 
dices, and bending them to the truth. 



448 THE CEEATIVE POWER IN MEN CONTINGENT 

Allow me then to repeat to you a truth which we 
have as yet barely glanced at, but which is calcu- 
lated yet to shed an infinite amount of light upon 
the philosophy of human nature and human history. 
That truth is as follows, and I conjure you to ponder 
it well if you would ever hope to master the true 
secret of the spiritual creation : Although God our 
creator is real or spiritual and inward man, and by 
that fact stands pledged eventually to show Himself 
sole actual or natural and outward man also, never- 
theless His entire ability to do this is in strict abey- 
ance to His creature's good pleasure in the premisses, 
or depends upon the human race giving Him a 
chance to accomplish the task. For He is the ab- 
solute creator of men, and by that very fact bound 
in such intimate solidarity with them, that He can- 
not bestow any of His own potencies and felicities 
upon them without their own free consent and con- 
currence. Much less therefore can He bestow upon 
them that knowledge of Himself as the only true 
subject of their nature which is immortal life, so 
long as they each stupidly persist in maintaining 
that they themselves are its sole true subjects, and 
He himself consequently its sole undeniable object. 
We cannot hope then to see God avouching himself 
both inwardly and outwardly, both really and actu- 
ally, both spiritually and naturally, true man, and 



UPON THEIR NATURE TAKING FORM. 449 

alone fit to bear the untarnished name of Man, until 
the human race becomes so fused within itself — 
that is, so constituted in felt or conscious unity with 
itself — as to form a perfect society, brotherhood, or 
fellowship of its particular and universal elements, 
each of its members spontaneously devoting himself 
to the welfare of all, and all the members in their 
turn freely espousing the welfare of each. 

Then doubtless, and not before, the creator of men 
will have become formal, existential, or natural man 
as well as substantial, essential, or spiritual man> and 
you and I will never again be such arrant idiots 
spiritually as to deem ourselves God's true creatures 
in our own private right, or out of social solidarity 
with all other men. For the great phenomenon of 
human society — of men made social out of, and so 
to speak by virtue of, their extreme and inveterate 
selfishness — will then strike every eye as the con- 
summate miracle of God's spiritual perfection in our 
nature, and the eternally sufficing manifestation of 
His matchless adorable name. But until the human 
race attains to plenary social form we may be very 
sure that as the end of God's spiritual creation in 
human nature meanwhile must be perfectly obscured 
or overlaid by men's prevalent ignorance and super- 
stition, so, much more, the origin of that nature in 
God's infinite love and wisdom will be completely 



450 KATUEE THE SPHERE OF 

misapprehended, as we see in point of fact it has 
been. For men have always been wont to attribute 
any thing but a Divine genesis to their nature, as- 
signing a purely a posteriori origin to it in place of 
an a priori one. That is to say, they make it origi- 
nate in a gradual evolution of humanity from pre- 
cedent mineral, vegetable, and animal forms : thus 
in effect or figuratively making the head of creation 
take the place of its heels, or subjecting soul to 
body, statue to pedestal, oyster to shell, ship to 
sails, church to steeple, house to foundation, man 
to clothing. 

Now let me say that it is nothing but this help- 
lessly carnal habit of mind in us — this instinctive 
and inveterate tendency on our part to envisage cre- 
ation, not as a spiritual Divine life or truth in man, 
but only as a dead material fact or thing — which 
forever condemns us in ourselves to a purely natural 
or metaphysic and phenomenal existence; that is 
to say, to an existence which is as remote in itself 
from spiritual truth as it is from material fact, being 
equidistant from, and inaccessible to, the inward 
life of the angel on the one hand, and the purely out- 
ward or sensuous life of the devil on the other. And 
the obvious reason of this state of things : that is 
to say, the reason why nature exhibits this strictly 
neutral or equatorial quality — making the divided 



REDEMPTION IN MAN. 451 

hemispheres of good and evil, heaven and hell, spirit 
and flesh, eternally spherical in itself, that is, making 
them one and equal as the two opposing abutments 
of a bridge are made one and equal in the bridge 
— is that the problem of creation to the Divine 
mind, being how eternally to reconcile two factors, 
creator and creature, which are totally irreconcilable 
in themselves, one being all fulness, the other all 
want, one all spirit or life, the other all flesh or 
death, inexorably demands therefore for its solu- 
tion a third or middle term which shall be neutral 
or indifferent to either factor, infinite or finite, by 
avouching itself a rigidly indefinite or universal quan- 
tity as the unity of each and all. Accordingly this 
requisite and accommodating middle term which 
actually solves the creative problem is supplied 
by human nature. Human nature impartially solves 
the creative problem, because while it is absolutely 
neutral or rather altogether negative with respect to 
either interest, creative or created, in se, it is there- 
fore most positive or affirmative with respect to 
both as they become conjoined in living unity. The 
method of this conjunction, from which the spirit- 
ual creation results, arises from the gradual experi- 
mental conversion of the principle of self in man, 
the evil principle, which represents the finite man, 
into the principle of society or fellowship, the good 



452^ THE INWARD MEANING OF CREATION 

principle, which represents the infinite humanity, so 
making God and man naturally, as they always have 
been spiritually, one. 

This then is an explicit statement of what I im- 
plicitly said about nature in the last letter ; but after 
all it is an account of nature on its theoretic rather 
than its practical side, or as it exists to the mind 
of its author only and not as it appears to a finite 
dependent intelligence. Practically then, or to the 
finite mind, nature, as. I went on to say in that letter, 
reveals itself not, to be sure, in its own perfect or 
consummate spiritual way, as an undefined or uni- 
versal form, being the unity of the whole and its 
parts, but in the specific form of conscience, or the 
law upon which man's natural freedom is negatively 
conditioned, the purpose of conscience being to re- 
deem him out of the bondage he is under by birth 
to his physical organization, and so qualify him for 
social or distinctively human form, which is the only 
form commensurate with the spiritual Divine per- 
fection or infinitude. In other words creation in its 
finite natural aspect, its aspect towards the carnal 
creature, necessarily wears the appearance of an eman- 
cipating, spiritualizing, or redemptive operation, di- 
vorcing the creature from the organic bondage to 
which he is born subject, and investing him instead 
with moral and rational freedom. 



IS MAN'S DELIVERANCE FROM EVIL. 453 

But here I must beg you to note with most 
minute attention one thing, which is : that morality 
and rationality, although they separate man from ani- 
mal, and thereby qualify hum to take the name of 
man, yet they do this only provisionally. They do not 
invest him with absolute, but only with phenomenal, 
manhood, making his real participation of human 
nature altogether contingent upon his personal hu- 
mility, or the degree in which he freely admits the 
neighbor to a first place in his habitual regards and 
limits himself to the second place. Freedom and 
rationality by no means give any of us a title to 
the Divine potencies and felicities which inhere in 
human nature; thev onlv make him, or inscribe 
him as, a candidate for such title. In short they 
give man a quasi or mere negative and seeming nat- 
ural consciousness, by no means a real or positive 
one, and hence they do not guarantee him the spir- 
itual Divine being of which human nature is the 
sole possible vehicle whether to man or angel. 

For example. My moral manhood, which stands 
in my felt freedom of will to choose between good 
and evil, is not absolute but contingent or condi- 
tional : being rigidly conditioned upon my actually 
choosing good. If, as some persons not very clear- 
sighted are wont to pretend, my will cannot feel 
itself free to do one thing unless it feel itself also 



454 MAN'S FREEDOM AND RATIONALITY 

free at the same time to do the exact contrary thing, 
I would not call this latter faculty by the sacred 
name of freedom, but by that of bondage, since it 
can be exercised only at the expense of renouncing 
one's manhood. My moral manhood depends, and de- 
pends absolutely, upon my felt freedom always to 
take the side of good in preference to evil whenever 
and wherever I find them conflicting, and never the 
side of evil in preference to good. Thus if in case 
of conflict I actually choose evil, or prefer it to good, 
my moral or provisional manhood not only turns out 
an actual sham, but by the foreclosure of the condition 
on which its entire possibility was based, sinks below 
animality even, and becomes frankly evil or diabolic. 
It is true, I may not in so doing recognize that I 
am incurring a forfeiture of all human possibilities, 
and probably shall not, going on indeed to prate of 
my superb and lustrous manhood even after I have 
shut myself up in hell. But this will be simply 
because manhood is an inward not an outward form 
or quality, and therefore only to be inwardly dis- 
cerned, whereas I in the circumstances supposed 
am really or inwardly knavish not human, and rec- 
ognize manhood therefore only as accomplished 
knavery. 

In like manner precisely my rational manhood, 
which stands in the freedom of my understanding 



DO NOT MAKE HIM MAN: 455 

to discriminate the true from the false, proves itself 
no manhood at all, but the veriest monkey hood and 
mockery of humanity, if I forbear to exert it, or 
devoutly exercise myself in it, by actually loving the 
true and rejecting I7ie false. To be sure, as some 
of our egregious logic-choppers counsel me to do, I 
may interpret my moral and rational manhood into 
a state of utter serene indifference with respect to 
the rival claims of good and evil upon my heart, 
and the rival claims of truth and falsity upon my 
understanding. But in that event my vaunted moral 
and rational manhood turns out a mere faculty to 
prefer good or evil, truth or falsity, at my own un- 
godly pleasure. In which case my moral manhood 
is my right to do just as I please, without regard 
to any holier or higher law. In other words it ex- 
presses my actual independence both of God and 
man. But this is a manhood which can never come 
from God, for there is no fibre of foundation for it 
in the whole range of His perfection. He himself 
has no independence of action, and He could never 
impart to His creature therefore what He did not 
Himself possess. His inmost life is dependent upon 
His actually equalizing His creature with Himself, 
or making Himself over to the latter in all the plen- 
itude of His resources. And all His action is con- 
strained by this unselfish end, and addressed unfal- 



456 THEY MERELY QUALIFY 

teringly to its promotion. Any freedom or man- 
hood therefore which looks towards independence, or 
makes the moral and rational subject his own law, 
should be indignantly spurned by him as a base 
infernal counterfeit of the true Divine manhood. 
That a man in loving good should feel himself free 
to love its opposite can only be possible on one of 
two conditions : Either good and evil must be at 
bottom identical, and differ only in name; which 
is an hypothesis too obviously stupid to invite con- 
sideration : or else the man does not honestly love 
good but for some temporary motive is willing to 
make a pretence of loving it : and this hypothesis 
thoroughly vitiates the problem, or reduces it to 
actual insignificance, by changing its terms. I do 
not deny of course that a man may actually or out- 
wardly take tea, when he really or inwardly prefers 
coffee. But that while he prefers coffee he should 
also feel himself free to prefer tea, is plainly a phe- 
nomenon referring itself to that grotesque world 
imagined by the late hard-headed but warm-hearted 
Mr. Mill, which no sun enlightens, but where a 
mild moonshine reigns supreme, and even the vir- 
tuous multiplication table grows wanton and indul- 
gent, permitting all its tender mathematical nurs^ 
lings to say twice two are five, and if five, why not 
fifty? 



HIM TO BECOME MAN. 457 

At any rate there is no such freedom as that here 
combated in God, and there can be no appearance 
of it in man His creature save as a diabolic illusion.* 
Whatever his silly creature may do in the premisses, 



* Swedenborg accordingly traces the existence of the hells to the 
strength of this illusion in men, and this undeniably is a sufficient 
foundation for them. That is to say, the hells simply mean — nothing 
more and nothing less — the enforced or obligatory companionship of 
all those among men who feel no inward liaison, or Divine-human bond 
of cohesion, drawing them to unity, and hence depend for their highest 
happiness upon the activity of the prudential instinct in them, or a 
life involving the perpetual balance of hope and fear. And if men 
really persuade themselves that their Divinely given manhood or free- 
dom involves the power of being good or evil at their own pleasure, 
I cannot for my part see that the hells are not the logical spontaneous 
outcome of such a persuasion. In fact their existence at once ceases 
to be a mystery, and becomes an open exigency of human welfare, an 
obvious inevitable necessity of man's natural development. For human 
nature, or the human race, is absolutely conditioned for its develop- 
ment upon man's power to love God (that is, infinite goodness and 
truth) apparently, but not really, of himself; or as Swedenborg writ- 
ing in Latin prefers to say, as of himself, but not of himself. For if 
man spontaneously loved goodness, loved it of his own natural force, 
he would be God, and no longer a creature of God ; and yet, so long 
as he does not love God or goodness of himself, if he did not at the 
same time love Him apparently of himself, or as of himself, he would 
not even have a negative approximation to his creative source, much less 
furnish a background or basis to the Divine being for the development 
of human nature. And failing both a positive and negative relation to 
God, of course the man can have no reality in him, spiritual or natural, 
and must remain the subject of a mere illusory or fantastic existence : 
and to be such a subject is to be a hell in least or miniature form. 



458 GOD IS ENTIRELY WITHOUT A POWER 

or rather boast himself of doing, God at least has 
no privilege of arbitrary or capricious action, because 
He has not the slightest power to do as He pleases, 
or make Himself into His own end of action. For 
God, as I have often enough said already, is essen- 
tially creative, creative by the whole force of His 
being; and His action therefore is inexorably under 
law to the welfare of His creature. He is not cre- 
ative from any inspiration of the head merely, that 
is, morally or voluntarily creative, as either from a 
sense of duty to His creatures, or from a sense of 
what is expedient with a view to enliven His own 
solitude, or better His own condition in any way; 
for His creatures have their being wholly in Him, 
and consequently can impose no outward obligation 
upon Him, and He himself consequently has no ex- 
istence save in His creatures, and can therefore feel 
no obligation to act with a view to the improvement 
of His own independent circumstances. Neither is 
He aesthetically creative, like the artist, that is, cre- 
ative from the hand, through taste or overpowering 
attraction : for His taste would utterly revolt from 
producing such loathsome vermin as His creatures 
are bound to be in their finite selves, if like the art- 
ist's creations those finite selves were unhappily to 
know no natural renewing. He is creative therefore 
only from the heart, that is, freely or spontaneously 



OF INDEPENDENT ACTION. 459 

creative, creative in Himself, or with His whole vital 
energy : which insures in the first place that His 
inmost life lies in communicating His own deathless 
being to the creature, that is, His own infinite and 
eternal potencies, felicities, and beatitudes, and then 
that all His innocent wisdom will go to supplant or 
render superfluous the wretched ^^-righteousness of 
the creature, in endowing him first of all with a 
righteous nature, or stable constitutional basis of ex- 
istence, whence he in his turn may every way freely 
or spontaneously react to the interior creative im- 
pulsion. 

We see then that the creator does not, and abso- 
lutely cannot, spiritually exist save in His creature. 
A fortiori therefore He has no power to make His 
own pleasure the law of His action, unless the bless- 
edness of his creature be always subsumed in that 
pleasure as its total substance and root. Thus He 
is absolutely inhibited by His essential infinitude or 
freedom from making self the end of His action, or 
ever doing under any circumstances as He pleases, 
without reference indeed to everybody else's welfare. 
He cheerfully allows us a monopoly of that saddest 
and most vulgar delight. For he who is essentially 
free or infinite as being creative, abjures all empirical, 
or felt conscious and phenomenal, freedom, because 
He is absolutely without selfhood, and has no contact 



460 OUR MORAL AND RATIONAL MANHOOD 

with the unclean thing save in His creatures. All 
His infinitude or freedom is mortgaged to the neces- 
sity of bringing His creature to ripe natural or 
spontaneous manhood, and only when that burden is 
accomplished and that most Divine pleasure realized 
will He enjoy His first faint chance of seeing Him- 
self reflected — in the happiness of His creature. 

Very well then : our moral and rational manhood 
is not our natural manhood, but only a distorted and 
diffracted image of that unitary substance as seen in 
the mirror of our divided and discordant personalities. 
It is a similitude of our natural manhood, a sort of 
photographic negative of it, by whose constant school- 
ing the Divine Artist prepares and leads us eventually 
to descry and detect the positive truth upon the sub- 
ject. It is a similitude or semblance which we in- 
deed are long content to mistake for the reality, but 
this comes of our never having yet known the reality 
by living contact, but only by hearsay. It is true 
that the reality once made itself known to men in 
a general prophetic way through a very remarkable 
historic person, miraculously born at a great crisis 
of the church's history, when the church itself was 
putting off her ritual or ceremonial dress, and taking 
on actual flesh-and-blood substance. But the great 
and merciful truth at that time clothed itself in such 
weak, dejected, dying literal form, that though its 



NOT A REAL BUT A TYPICAL MANHOOD. 461 

perfect humanity was seen, men have always been 
afraid to argue from that to its equally perfect divin- 
ity, and have been content instead simply to cherish 
the ecclesiastical tradition on that subject.* On his 

* This tradition does not appear to have profited men much intellec- 
tually, but doubtless it lias kept their memory, which is the porch of the 
mind, open to the admission of the spiritual truth on the subject. I 
remember a good many years ago conversing on this topic with a highly 
valued friend, who was besides a very distinguished name in literature. 
And he said in reply to an account I had been giving him of Sweden- 
borg's intellectual position with respect to the Christian revelation: 
The fatal criticism upon Christ's pretension to Divinity will always be the 
fact of his having ignominiously succumbed to his persecutors, when if his 
personal pretension were well founded he ought to have annihilated them. 
If Christ had ever authentically revealed Deity, he would have fashed 
home the conviction of his truth to every man that saw him, in sheer 
despite too of the man's strongest rational prepossessions to the contrary. 
I ventured to rejoin, that my friend's own notion upon the subject seemed 
to reduce poor deity to what the Erench would call an impasse within 
his own creation, or what our own rustics would call "a very hard fix," 
inasmuch as it neither allows him to become known in himself, nor yet 
permits him to reveal himself to men's knowledge in the nature of his 
creature, without effectually blighting at the same time all that makes 
that nature respectable, namely, the creature's freedom and rationality. 
This freedom and rationality, which alone give the creature a conscious- 
ness of manhood, are however what actually prevent his ever truly 
knowing God, for he both instinctively and deliberately claims these 
superb attributes as proper to himself or his own absolutely, and not 
exclusively as God's attributes in his common nature. A revelation from 
God accordingly which should involve the least practical dishonor to 
these attributes in man, is not to be thought of as possible. In fact 
the only revelation at all possible or thinkable from God to man, is 
one which conciliates every man's private freedom and rationality to it, 



462 CHRIST CRUCIFIED THE ONLY ADEQUATE 

Jewish side of course, which related him to a purely 
typical or figurative economy, Christ was bound to be 
accursed both of God and man ; for his personal pre- 
tension as the Jewish Messiah, sent to deliver his 
brethren according to the flesh from bondage, and 
exalt them to the supremacy of the nations, was as 
full of inward blasphemy towards the Divine name, 
as it was full of outward contempt towards the human 
race. It was only in his crucified aspect accordingly 
that he vindicates the spiritual truth of his mission, 
or allows any trace of his divinity to appear ; for here 
he is seen, in open contempt of every most sacred 
national tradition, sternly rejecting from himself a 
Jewish humanity, and putting on a universal one, that 
is, one which should be neither Jewish nor Gentile, 
but broadly unitary or universal, to the effacing of all 
literal discriminations whatever among men. 

But I have not taken so much pains to prove to 
you : that our moral and rational manhood is not a 
real manhood, but a quasi one, intended only as a 
preparation for our real or natural manhood when it 
comes : altogether for its own sake, but with a view 
also to get some needed light upon the answer to our 
third question, which it is high time we were con- 
by showing that God himself is the sole and infinite substance of these 
attributes, only in natural or impersonal, that is, universal and unitary, 
human form. 



REVELATION OF GOD IN HUMANITY. 463 

sidering. Our actual manhood as we have seen is an 
altogether provisional one intended to serve as a mere 
scaffolding to our natural manhood, as a mere foil or 
set-off to it when it is ready to appear in its own 
infinite Divine lustre ; and I have thought that by 
first familiarizing your imagination somewhat with 
this mighty truth I might assist you to a fuller com- 
prehension of the answer I am about to give to the 
question now before us. That question may be for- 
mulated thus : What precise machinery does human 
nature require in order historically to avouch itself, or 
authenticate itself to the public conscience of men, as 
the world's sole life : so at long last harmonizing 
the finite, phenomenal, or merely conscious man with 
God's spiritual infinitude or freedom ? 

The machinery of human nature by which it ulti- 
mates its proper life, turning all history into its obe- 
dient vehicle, and filling the entire public conscious- 
ness of men with its renown, is solely made up of 
what we call the church and the world. These terms, 
however, remember, express no objective but a purely 
subjective reality in man ; or what is the same thing 
they neither of them indicate a physical or material, 
but on the contrary a purely metaphysical or imma- 
terial, substance in humanity. And a purely metaphys- 
ical or immaterial substance in humanity can only be 
a mind. This accordingly is what the church and the 



464 THE CHURCH AND THE WORLD PURELY 

world mean, a purely mental or subjective reality in 
man; the former term being employed to designate in 
those to whom it is applied affections turned heaven- 
ward; the latter, affections turned earthward: "the 
church," in other words, characterizing the sphere of 
man's progressive mental development, " the world " 
the sphere of his arrested mental development. The 
whole of humanity is comprised in these two forms 
of man's mental subjectivity. A man must neces- 
sarily have his affections turned towards heaven, or 
confined to earth, and according as either is the case 
with him, he is a least or miniature form either of the 
church, or the world. The church of course tends to 
issue spiritually in a heaven made up of inwardly 
^generate men, and the world in its turn to issue 
in a coequal hell made up of inwardly degenerate 
men, so that unless the Divine power had effectually 
ultimated itself in human nature, and thereby broken 
up this fatal spiritual equilibrium, heaven and hell 
must have practically forever divided the spiritual 
world between them, and forever have given the lie 
consequently to the sovereign truth of God's creative 
infinitude. 

Nothing, I venture to say, can be imagined more re- 
volting to our humanitary instincts of such infinitude 
than the perfectly veracious or unexaggerated pictures 
which Swedenborg's phlegmatic genius gives us of 



SUBJECTIVE REALITIES IN MAN. 465 

what he witnessed among our post-mortem friends and 
cronies. If the friend or crony in question had been on 
earth a reverential person, and now consequently had 
his lot among the angels, Swedenborg invariably found 
that the man's natural imbecility, or insufficiency to 
himself, had undergone no change through the event of 
death, the man being all the while spiritually restrained 
from the frankest profligacy solely by the providence of 
God exerted towards him through angelic association. 
And if, on the other hand, our deceased acquaintance 
had been on earth an habitual votary of self and the 
world, and therefore inwardly a mocker of God and 
the neighbor, so that he now found himself to his 
great delight enrolled among the lowest of the low, 
Swedenborg nevertheless invariably discovers that the 
fellow's braggart selfhood is at bottom a pure hallu- 
cination or sham, dependent every moment for its illu- 
sory existence upon hellish influx and association, and 
tolerated only for some transient incidental use pro- 
moted by it to other existence. 

Could any thing then well be more hideous and 
implacable to human pity than such a picture of men's 
celestial or infernal possibilities, if the picture were 
intended to represent an eternal reality ? The picture 
to be sure was not intended to represent an eternal 
reality, but we see from it excellently well what the 
eternal reality must have been (only much worse), 



466 THEY AEE THE SIMPLE MACHINERY 

if the true sphere of the creative infinitude had not 
been realized in our nature. Now the evolution of 
man's natural destiny, and with it consequently his 
participation of immortal life, has been strictly iden- 
tical with the growth of the civilized State, that is, 
with the growth of our earthly life out of absolute 
bondage to the material elements of nature into a con- 
dition of free citizenship : so that we may say with 
entire truth that the advent of this (prospectively) free 
State of man on earth under which we have the hap- 
piness to live, has been the fruit of a gradually fiercer 
attrition between the church and the world, and of 
that exclusively. 

The two universally recognized elements then of 
our Christian civilization, which are the church and 
the world, make up between them that requisite ma- 
chinery of human nature by whose conflicting yet con- 
current play it finally avouches itself the supreme law 
of man's activity. I do not say, mind you, that the 
church and the world are in the least identical with 
human nature, or that they have any claim to a parti- 
cle of her Divine prestige and dignity. God forbid ! 
All I say is that they constitute the mere machinery 
of human nature by which it gradually works itself 
out to the light of day. They are the simple machinery 
of its evolution by which it eventually succeeds in 
bringing itself to men's recognition as the conditio 



OF OUR NATURAL EVOLUTION. 467 

sine qua non of their Divine and immortal life. Their 
sole historic or Providential purpose has been to serve 
as a platform to the development of men's real or 
natural consciousness, as utterly distinct from and in- 
veterately hostile to their phenomenal or personal con- 
sciousness ; and when this use has been accomplished 
they are bound, both of them, to tumble off into " the 
condition of weeds and worn-out faces." Thus the 
church and the world bear to each other the relation 
of base and superstructure, or negative and positive 
conditions of one and the same metaphysic result, that 
result being the evolution of humanity, or of men's 
natural consciousness in orderly social form. The 
incessant attrition to which these base mechanical 
factors of human nature are doomed by their fierce 
mutual antagonism, is practically obviated in great 
part by their engendering between them what we term 
the civilized State of man, as a temporary compromise 
between creature and creator, or a richly provisional 
outcome of human destiny while the social form of our 
nature is still unachieved, or its grand consummate 
celestial flower is still in abeyance to the coarse earthly 
necessities of leaf, and stem, and roots. And they 
both appear at last so approximately humanized, or 
weaned of their inveterate animosity, in their child the 
State, but especially in their grandchild, which is the 
free State or republic, that although they have neither 



468 THE EXISTING WORLD-WIDE 

of them the least intrinsic fitness to guide or control 
human destiny, they have yet somehow had the art or 
address to perpetuate their bad empire over the hu- 
man mind down to this very day. 

This in fact is to-day the world-wide tragedy of 
human life. Human life, even now when its social 
ideal is so imperfectly realized even in thought, would 
be a tolerably clean and reputable thing, were not its 
honest interests so foully complicated with those of 
the self-righteous church and the selfish, servile world. 
This metaphysic machinery of human nature, instead 
of any longer unconsciously promoting its evolution, 
has consciously undertaken to stifle it by compressing 
its nascent activity. That is to say, the church and 
the world, in the persons of their more astute adepts, 
have begun dimly to feel that their joint offspring, the 
civilized State of man, was never intended by God's 
providence to be a finality in human history. I don't 
mean to say that worldly and ecclesiastical minds, 
however astute they may be, have the least intellectual 
insight of God's truth upon this subject. I have n't 
the slightest idea, myself, that they have any intel- 
lectual discernment of the entirely provisional or provi- 
dential character of our existing civilization, in that it 
was intended to base a Divine-natural evolution of 
human life, and disappear bag and baggage when that 
end is accomplished. But these secular and ecclesi- 



TRAGEDY OF HUMAN LIFE 469 

astical minds are at least in sensible contact with the 
actual facts and leading providential tendencies of the 
time, and their own inordinate self-love and love of 
rule insure that none shall feel so keenly as they the 
gathering clouds that are rolling up from within over 
the technical State, erelong to descend in floods of 
devouring rain, hail, and tempest upon the devoted 
heads of those whose hope in God is limited to it. 
Hence their present persistent efforts to perpetuate 
and extend their empire, by appealing no longer to 
the political or civic conscience of men for support, 
but to the hopes and fears of the private or personal 
consciousness. 

This however is a gross usurpation. Neither church 
nor world has a shadow of claim upon men's individual 
respect and attention, save in so far as men first of all 
have a purely superstitious regard for the State as a 
finality of God's earthly providence. Nothing can be 
more preposterous than this baleful superstition. The 
State has no permanent or absolute rights over the 
human conscience. It was never intended, as I have 
already shown, for any thing else than a mere locum 
tenens, a simple herald or lieutenant, to Society, while 
Society itself was as yet wholly unrecognized, and 
indeed undreamt of, as the sole intellectual truth of 
man's Divine-natural destiny. And the church mean- 
while as the genitor of this temporary civilized State 



470 IS THAT CHURCH AND WORLD PERSIST 

of man, has no other office in the name of the celes- 
tial or paternal providence that presides over it, than 
prophetically to promise every man a mens sana, that 
is, a sound mind. Neither has the world, as the 
genitrix of the State, any other office derived from the 
earthly or maternal providence involved in the State, 
than prophetically to promise every man a corpus 
sanum, that is, a sound body, wherein his mens sana 
may house itself with comfort, and exercise its power 
unimpeded. But no one has ever been such an abject 
noodle as to maintain that this Divine prophecy and 
promise in behalf of universal man kept up by the 
church and the world, were ever intended to be ful- 
filled by the merely instituted State of man, that is, 
by a regimen of mere citizenship, in which the con- 
science of men should be persistently held submissive 
to tutors and governors. At all events, the actual 
facts of the case must soon disenchant him. For no 
fact is more notorious than that there is actually no 
man within the precincts of civilization possessing an 
absolutely healthy mind, or an absolutely healthy body. 
In truth the church and the world, in generating civil- 
ization, have had a purely prophetic relation to the 
human mind, and no pretension can be more utterly 
absurd on their part than to claim any relevancy to 
man's living or spiritual consciousness. They have 
never had the slightest claim to human respect in 



IN BURROWING IN MEN'S PRIVATE CONSCIENCE. 471 

themselves, but only in producing their joint offspring, 
the State. They rightfully end or merge in her forma- 
tion, and have no logical pretension to survive it a 
single instant. Above all and at this day they have no 
particle of right to arrogate the least control over the 
mind of any man who does not conscientiously iden- 
tify his manhood with the State, or limit it to good 
citizenship, so forever rejecting the invitations of in- 
finite goodness and truth. 

For this empirical State of man, whereby he is 
providentially led into accurate self-knowledge, and 
so prepared for an immortal destiny, is with us — as 
our constitutional polity as a community announces 
— functus officio, or thoroughly exanimate as to the 
beneficent spiritual uses which once consecrated it 
to men's respect. Our constitutional polity as a com- 
munity makes no provision for priest or king, which 
seem essential to the State in its merely political 
form, and we may not unreasonably infer accord- 
ingly that the State under these skies is casting its 
old political skin, and putting on one which is more 
decidedly flexible, and congruous with the perfected or 
social form of our nature. In other words : the common 
life of man in this hemisphere is undergoing a marked 
formal or providential change, in ceasing any longer 
to acknowledge outward sanctions, and learning more 
and more to acknowledge only inward ones. Of 



472 STATES NO SOONER BECOME UNITED 

course this improvement in the common lot involves 
a corresponding demoralization in the private or per- 
sonal sphere, save where men's personal life distinctly 
reflects the common life, or acknowledges no law so 
sacred as that of the public welfare. For there are 
it must be admitted too many fierce and avaricious 
natures among us to whom the State no longer exists 
as the symbol or representative of an outward order in 
human life, and at the same time does not begin to re- 
veal itself as the symbol or representative of a much 
more constraining inward order, and all these neces- 
sarily look upon their fellow-men as delivered over to 
their use to be fleeced ad libitum. But notwithstand- 
ing these deplorable limitations I insist that the dis- 
tinctively common unconscious life of these spiritual 
latitudes — that is to say, the heart and mind of the 
American people, uncontaminated by European and 
especially sacerdotal pauperism — is one of great eleva- 
tion. And there is no way to account for the fact but 
by acknowledging that the American State is really 
become the vehicle of an enlarged human spirit. I 
have myself no doubt of the constant operation of this 
cause.* Living as I for many years have done 

* It ought not to be forgotten in this connection that the form of our 
polity bears on its very face, that is, in its name, an intimation of the 
spiritual change it represents. It is not America, but the United 
States of America, "one out of many," as its motto reads, to which the 



THAN SOCIETY IS INAUGUKATED. 473 

among plain New England people, I am continually 
struck with the singular natural or interior refinement 
I encounter in persons who have obviously been all 
their lives without any exceptional outward advan- 
tages. They spread many of them such a humane or 
impersonal savor around them that they seem " native 
born" to the skies, and if their culture were only 
equal to their nature, or their manners as good as 
their morals, heaven would begin to be realized on 
earth. But we cannot have everything at once, and 
they give us the essential at least. 

The sum of all I have been alleging is that we 
as a community are fully launched at length upon 
that metaphysic sea of being whose mystic waters float 
the sapphire walls of the New Jerusalem, metropolis 
of earth and heaven. It is not a city built of stone 
nor of any material rubbish, since it has no need of 
sun or moon to enlighten it ; but its foundations are 
laid in the eternal wants or passions of the human 
heart sympathetic with God's infinitude, and its walls 
are the laws of man's deathless intelligence subjecting 
all things to his allegiance. Neither is it a city into 
which shall ever enter any thing that defile th, nor 

expiring states of Europe bow, or do deepest homage, in sending over 
to these shores their starving populations to be nourished and clothed 
and otherwise nursed into citizenship, which is a condition preliminary 
to their being socialized. 



474 THE ONLY OBSTACLE TO GOD'S KINGDOM 

any thing that is contrary to nature, nor yet any thing 
that produceth a lie ; for it is the city of God coming 
down to men out of the stainless heavens, and there- 
fore full of pure unmixed blessing to human life, and 
there shall be no more curse. These things are hard 
to be believed as falling within the compass of our 
dishonored and bedraggled life. But this is only be- 
cause our feeble-minded and narrow-hearted clergy 
have been so utterly incompetent as a general thing 
to divine God's infinitude, or enlighten the public 
sense in His adorable ways. For do not they them- 
selves regard our beggarly citizenship as the final 
achievement of God's omnipotence in our nature ? 
Do they not perpetually sacrifice the patient bleeding 
truth of human brotherhood or society to it ? Do 
they not consequently cling to their squalid and ven- 
omous little ecclesiasticisms as the last hope of hu- 
manity ? These very ecclesiasticisms it is which are 
the foulest stain upon humanity, and do more as 
Christ alleged than all the world to make men willing 
children of hell. At the bottom of every human heart, 
not ecclesiastically perverted, there is, we may be sure, 
a latent belief in God's spiritual omnipotence or in- 
finitude, and a hope of seeing it eventually realized in 
our natural form. But what chance have this benign 
belief and hope of surviving the torrent of falsity and 
unbelief which now descends from the Christian pul- 



IS THE HYPOCRISY OF THE CHURCH. 475 

pit, orthodox and unitarian alike ? Christ's own name 
in the church has become a synonyme for the most 
signal dishonor shown to God's spiritual perfection, 
and he who was put to his death of shame only by 
the righteous men of his day and generation, now 
finds himself in ours resuscitated to one infinitely 
more infamous and helpless, in being made the shib- 
boleth of the frankest and most unconscious spiritual 
hypocrisy ever revealed under heaven. 

The best life of the world is growing more than 
suspicious of the sanctity which attaches to facts or 
events, and insists accordingly upon finding the Chris- 
tian facts and events interesting or memorable only in 
so far as they consent to represent a truth very much 
more universal than they literally, or on their face, 
constitute. And this accounts for that alleged " de- 
cease of faith," which has become among our dis- 
honest churchmen the fashionable religious cant of 
our day. Men of a spiritual or humanitary culture 
are becoming very contemptuous of any Divine cre- 
dentials that are not first of all exquisitely and in- 
tensely human. They unaffectedly resent the old 
dogmatic traditions of God's outward or physical 
activity in creation as dreams of the race's pagan 
infancy. They are ashamed any longer to acknowl- 
edge God as a clever charlatan or conjurer, seeking 
by an incongruous display of magical power and 



476 THE LATE COLLAPSED MR. MOODY 

majesty to propitiate men's inward and rational rev- 
erence. And in confirmation of this statement I 
appeal to your own testimony whether, when any 
noisy " evangelist " so-called, like the late collapsed 
Mr. Moody, or the present distended Mr. Cook, comes 
along to insult this tender, ineffable Divine-natural 
renaissance in us, and menace it with the blight of 
the lower regions, you have not yourself always ob- 
served that the energumenous mountebank never suc- 
ceeds in doing any thing beyond inflaming his fellow- 
quidnuncs of the conventicle but convert himself 
into an object of quiet public contempt and derision ? 
This indeed is one of the most heavenly omens of our 
day, when we consider the hopeless inertness of the 
mass of men to the solicitations of spiritual truth, that 
some untidy zealot or other should ever and anon feel 
himself prompted by his irritable lusts to come forth 
from his subterranean lair, and vituperate the sun- 
shiny upper world — this sunshiny, respectable, com- 
monplace world — until by his grotesque antics he 
forces it in spite of itself to recognize the spiritual 
arrogance and blasphemy which are the veritable soul 
and substance of our professional religion. I don't, to 
be sure, very much love this respectable, commonplace 
world myself, and am very apt to feel my respiration 
impeded under its decent bondage ; but I easily con- 
done all its shortcomings, were they twenty times 



OR PRESENT DISTENDED MR. COOK. 477 

greater than they are, whenever I am thus made to see 
how steadfast a providential breakwater it makes to 
every recurrent wave of men's fanatical self-righteous- 
ness, or tyrannous love of dominion. 

But it is time to bring this letter, and the whole 
series of which it is a part, to an end, for though 
many an interesting point remains to be touched 
upon, I have substantially finished the task I con- 
templated when I set out, and my bodily health is no 
longer good enough to make work for its own sake 
attractive to me. Now that my task is done, I wish 
I could have accomplished it more skilfully ; though 
to have accomplished it at all, with the impover- 
ished nerves left me, is matter of no little thanks- 
giving. I have had no help in writing but that of the 
Holy Ghost, which nowadays is no private possession, 
but is the common property of all spiritually upright 
men, being the identical spirit of their nature. And 
accordingly my only dread all along has been lest my 
inevitably private and particular accents should some- 
how overlay and obscure its public or universal ones. 
What I thought by its inspiration to say to you at 
the beginning was a very simple thing. I intended 
to show the exact harmony between the literal per- 
sonal facts of Christ's life, and the spiritual or creative 
truth of which those facts have been our only adequate 
harbinger and revelation. Christ's suffering and glo- 



478 THE AUTHOR TAKES AN AFFECTIONATE 

rifled person was but a normal outcome and expression 
of the infinite creative love towards the human race, 
a love which contents itself with nothing short of the 
rescue of the created nature from the hands of the 
actual or phenomenal creature, and its exaltation to 
supreme dominion : and if we honor the historic type 
of this great transaction, much more ought we to hon- 
or the infinite and eternal spiritual substance which 
alone inwardly shaped it, and made it the only symbol 
of thoroughly perfect or Divine manhood the world 
has ever known, or ever will know. And having done 
this I thought to sing a paean over our despised and 
dishonored nature, which is at last enthroned in om- 
nipotent majesty above the spiritual world, so that 
the once divided but now united realms of heaven 
and hell fall beneath it, and equally attest its will : 
or if not equally, who knows whether in the miracu- 
lous providence of God, what is last in rank may not 
as heretofore avouch itself first in use ? 

This I repeat was all in effect I intended to say, 
and so do justice to the peaceful spiritual meaning of 
the Christian facts as they are reported in the gospels. 
But I found my pathway so beset with gainsaying 
not only on the part of our professional religionists, 
but on that also of our sectarian scientific zealots, that 
I was obliged to pay my respects to these several 
opponents as I went along, so that in spite of myself 



LEAVE OF HIS CORRESPONDENT, 479 



my voice grew full of tumult even in setting forth the 
pacific gospel truth. The sectarian religionist cleaves 
to the Christian facts, but denies their subserviency to 
a higher order of truth. The sectarian " scientist," as 
he is called, denies the authenticity of the Christian 
facts in submission to a lower order of facts. I hold the 
Christian facts to be authentic, because I see them to 
be needful ultimates or exponents of otherwise undis- 
coverable and inconceivable spiritual truth. Indeed I 
hold the life, death, and ascension of Jesus Christ to be 
the only facts of human history which are not in them- 
selves illusory or fallacious, because they alone base a 
new creation in man to which every fibre of his nature 
— starved and revolted by the actual creation — 
eagerly responds. But viewing the facts absolutely : 
that is, regarding them apart from the light they 
reflect upon the creative infinitude and the destiny of 
man the creature of that infinitude, and consequently 
as designed merely to set off the person of Christ to 
the everlasting homage of mankind : they seem to me 
utterly flat, vapid, and contemptible. I by no means 
desire to apologize then for the contentious strain of 
my letter, but prefer to end by rehearsing a lovely 
bit of Swedenborg's experience. 

" Once upon a time a numerous crowd of spirits 
was about me which I heard as a flux of something 
disorderly. The spirits complained, apprehending 



480 BY A CITATION FROM SWEDENBORG. 

that a total destruction was at hand, for in the crowd 
there was no sign of association, and this made them 
fear destruction, which they supposed also would 
be total as is the case when such things [namely, 
the absence of mutual association] happen. But in 
the midst of this disorderly flux of spirits I apper- 
ceived a soft sound angelically sweet in which 
was nothing but harmony. The angelic choirs were 
within, and the crowd of- spirits to whom the discord 
belonged was without. This flowing angelic strain 
continued a long while, and it was said that hereby 
was represented how the Lord rules things confused 
and disorderly which are without or on the surface, 
namely : by virtue of a central peace, whereby the 
inharmonic things in the circumference are reduced 
into order, each being restored from the error of its 
nature." 

If then you discern the central peace which is in 
my little book, I do not think its superficial polemics 
will seem out of place. And so, farewell. 



APPENDIX A. 




EECY is equal whether exhibited towards heaven or 
hell. It is of mercy to be punished, because all 
the evil of punishment is made subservient unto 
good. — A. C. 587. 

Equilibrium is so perfect in the spiritual world that evil 
always inevitably returns upon him who commits it, and so 
punishes him. This is called the permission of evil, and is 
allowed for the sake of amendment, and thus the Lord turns 
all the evil of punishment into good, so that nothing but 
good is from Him. — A. C. 592. 

An evil spirit told me that he was in heaven when he was 
in the life of self-love, and that it was impossible any other 
heaven could be than the one he made for himself. But it was 
replied that his (self-made) heaven is turned into hell whenever 
the real heaven flows into it. — A. C. 6484. 

By the marvellous providence of the Lord evils are con- 
tinually bent to good : for the Divine end to good universally 
reigns. Hence it is that nothing in the universe is permitted 
except for the end that some good may result from it. But 
whereas man has freedom to the intent that he may be re- 
formed, he is bent to good so far as he permits himself to be 
bent in freedom; thus continually from the most grievous 



482 APPENDIX A. 



liell into which he strives assiduously to plunge himself, into 
a milder, if he absolutely cannot be led to heaven. — A. C. 
6489 ; see also 3854. 

No evil can befall any one without its being immediately 
counteracted, for when evil preponderates then it is chastised, 
by the law of equilibrium ; but solely to this end, that good 
may ensue. — A. C. 689. 

When any one in hell does evil, he is punished ; the Lord 
permitting this for the sake of his amendment, since He is 
essential justice. — True Christian Religion, 459. 

God governs and disposes all things by turning the evil of 
punishment and temptation into good. — A. C. £45. 

It is to be further observed that all evil inflows into man 
from hell, and all good from the Lord through heaven. But 
the reason why evil, being thus an influx into man, is appro- 
priated to him or becomes his own, is because he believes and 
persuades himself that he thinks and does it of himself; where- 
as if he believed according to the truth of the case that it is 
always a veritable influx, evil would not then be appropriated 
to him, or become his own, but good from the Lord would 
be appropriated instead. For in this case when evil flowed 
in the man would instantly think that it came from the evil 
spirits attendant upon him, and when he thought this, the 
angels would turn it aside or reject it. For the influx of the 
angels is into what a man knows and believes, and never into 
ivhat he does not /enow and believe : since angelic influx is 
nowhere fixed or permanent save in things pertaining to man. 
When man thus makes evil his own, by obstinately believing 
that he originates it, he procures to himself a sphere of that 
particular evil, and so conjoins himself with hell, for in spir- 
itual life conjunction is effected by accordant spheres. Thus 



APPENDIX A. 483 



the spiritual sphere of man or spirit exhales from the life 
of his love, and advertises his quality even to those at a 
distance from him. — A. C. 6206. 

They who think from an idea of space, as every one does 
who is in the world, perceive that hell and heaven are spatially 
very remote from man. But the fact is exactly contrary to 
their impression of it, heaven and hell being in man, and 
nowhere outside of him, heaven in the good man, and hell 
in the bad man. Furthermore every one after death floats 
into the exact heaven or into the exact hell with which he 
identifies himself in the world. — A. C. 8918. 

Sometimes spirits recently deceased, who have been evil 
inwardly during their life in the world, but outwardly orderly 
from prudence, complain that they are not admitted into 
heaven, having apparently no other opinion of heaven but as a 
place into which admission is granted of favor. But they 
are told that heaven is denied to no one, and if they desire 
admission they may have it. But when they come into the 
most external and superficial of the heavenly societies, they 
perceive, by reason of the incongruity of the heavenly sphere 
with their own, what seems to them an infernal anguish and 
torment, and cast themselves down, saying that heaven is 
hell to them, and that they had no notion previously of its 
being such an uncomfortable place. — A. C. 4226. 






APPENDIX B. 




PROPRIUM OR SELFHOOD, THE SOURCE OE ALL EVIL. 

A.N'S appearing to himself to have a proprium, or 
private selfhood, is a state, says Swedenborg, resem- 
bling sleep, because while he is in. it he knows no 
otherwise than that he lives, thinks, speaks, and acts of him- 
self. When, however, he begins to know that this is false 
he starts as it were out of sleep and wakes up. — A. C. 147. 

Man's proprium when viewed by heavenly light appears 
altogether like something osseous, inanimate, and thoroughly 
deformed, consequently as in itself dead. But when vivified 
by the Lord's life it looks like flesh. Man's proprium, or 
selfhood, is indeed a mere dead nothing, although to himself 
it looks so real and important as even to be his all. What- 
ever lives in man flows in from the Lord's life, and if this 
influx were arrested the man would drop stone dead; for 
man is only an organ receptive of life, and according to his 
recipiency as an organ will be his reproduction of the life. 
Real proprium, or selfhood, belongs to the Lord alone, and 
from his proprium is vivified that of man. The Lord's pro- 
prium is indicated by his saying after death to his disciples 
who thought him a spirit : " a spirit hath not flesh and bones 
as ye see me have." — A. C. 149. 



APPENDIX B. 485 



It lias been proved to me by sensible experience that a 
man, a spirit, and an angel, considered in himself, is as the 
most vile and filthy excrement, and when left to himself 
breathes nothing but hatred, revenge, cruelty, and the foulest 
adulteries : these things making up his proprium, and will. 
This may appear to any person who reflects that man, when 
first born, is more vile than any living animal, and that when 
he grows np, and is left to his own devices — unless he be 
prevented by external restraints, such as legal penalties, and 
those prudential restraints which he imposes upon himself 
in order to become great and rich — he would rush headlong 
into all sorts of wickedness, and never rest until he had 
subdued all men to himself, and seized their property, not 
sparing any but those who promised to become his slaves. 
Such is the nature of every man [by reason, no doubt, of the 
infinitude of his creative source, reflected in what is so obvi- 
ously unsuitable to reproduce it as the proprium, or private 
selfhood, of the creature] notwithstanding his own ignorance 
of it growing out of his actual inability to accomplish his 
latent evil purposes. But were it possible for him to accom- 
plish them, all restraints being removed, he would rush 
headlong into their execution. This is by no means the case 
with beasts, who are born to a certain order of nature, and 
kill and devour purely to appease the cravings of hunger, and 
when this is satisfied they cease doing harm. — A. C. 987. 

A man's proprium, or private selfhood, is actually his own 
particular hell, for by it he communicates with hell. Thus 
the selfhood of its own nature desires nothing more ardently 
than to precipitate itself into hell, and also to draw all others 
along with it. — A. C. 1049. 



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